Year: 2017

This week in fascist academia

3:24 pm

This week’s collection of stories illustrating the fascist culture that permeates today’s academic community actually includes some good news. (My last fascist academia post can be seen here.)

First the bad:

The first story illustrates that this intolerance is not limited to the left. In this case a conservative university kicked out a speaker with more moderate views.

Nonetheless, the majority of these attacks on freedom of speech continue to come from the left or from left-leaning organizations. The last story indicates the trends, which include a significant shift towards violence and a disrespect for property rights.

Now for the good news.

In the first story we see a rare example of someone experiencing bad consequences for their bad fascist behavior. If only this would happen more often. In the second story the theatrical community, including the normally very leftwing partisan Dramatists Guild of America (!), has actually come out against censorship, even if that censorship involves opinions that attack modern liberal sacred cows, such as the racist Black Lives Matter movement. This action is so out of the norm that I am somewhat speechless.

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Tuesday’s election results

10:47 am

The election results from Tuesday, where Democrats won most of the significant races, has produced a lot of commentary, from both conservatives and liberals, about its significance.

To me, however, these results merely confirmed the increasingly regional nature of today’s partisan politics. This story, about a victory by a Democrat state senator candidate that puts the Democrats in complete control of Washington’s legislature, illustrates this best.

Dhingra’s victory in Washington state over Republican Jinyoung Englund means the West Coast is now the solid center of the resistance, with Democrats controlling legislatures and governorships from Seattle down to San Diego.

The Democratic victories on Tuesday all took place in areas where they strongly dominate (the coasts and urban centers), thus merely solidifying their control over those localized regions. I expect that future elections will show Republicans solidifying their control over their own regions (which is the rest of the country). In other words, people are beginning to choose sides, and we are heading to a regional and political divide that can only be solved in one of two ways: The U.S. splits, or a civil war (in the literal sense) breaks out.

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A simple and inexpensive skin cancer detector wins award

10:10 am

A simple and inexpensive skin cancer detector has won the $40,000 2017 James Dyson award.

Designed by a team from McMaster University in Canada, the sKan can make more accurate diagnoses quickly and reasonably cheaply. It’s based around the fact that cancer cells have a faster metabolic rate than healthy cells, meaning they release more heat. To check if a patch of skin has the beginnings of a melanoma, the suspected area is first cooled with an ice pack before the sKan device is placed against the skin.

Using an array of temperature sensors called thermistors, the sKan will then monitor the area as the skin warms back up. If there’s a melanoma present, it will warm up faster than the surrounding skin, revealing itself on a heat map and temperature difference time plot created through a connected computer program.

Once this device is in the hands of dermatologists, they will be able to very quickly diagnose whether a skin mole or freckle is dangerous or not.

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India’s space agency ISRO hopes to double launch rate

10:02 am

Capitalism in space: ISRO officials said yesterday that the agency plans to double its launch rate next year, while also shifting as much of its space manufacturing effort to the private sector.

Currently, the space agency launches 9 to 10 spacecraft built by it every year. Dr K Sivan, director of Thiruvananthapuram-based Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, said, “Isro is targeting to double the number of launches from 9-10 to 18-19 launches per year.”

On outsourcing of jobs to the private industry, Isro chairman A S Kiran Kumar said the space agency does as much activity as possible with the industry. “Wherever it’s possible to get things done through the industry, we are doing and it will only increase in the coming days because we need to do more frequent activities,” he told a news agency. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted language is patently false. India has never launched 9 spacecraft in a year. Last year it set a record with 7 launches. This false overstatement casts some doubt to me of the sincerity of the second claim, that the agency wishes to shift as much responsibility to the private sector as possible. Government agencies rarely give up power. In the U.S. the decision by NASA to shift from NASA-built rockets to commercially-built rockets took decades (occurring reluctantly in 2008 after years of lobbying), and even a decade after that decision the transition is hardly guaranteed.

Nonetheless, that ISRO officials are setting a goal of 18-19 launches a year indicates that they truly do want to compete with the big launch players.

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ESA to lead international effort to track falling Chinese space station

9:50 am

The European Space Agency has taken the lead position in an international effort to track China’s falling Tiangong-1 test space station module.

The goal of the effort is to improve the accuracy of predicting the fall of such objects. Tiangong-1, at 8.5 tons, is big enough for some pieces to survive re-entry and crash to the ground. Improving the predictions of where it will fall will reduce the chances of the debris causing harm.

I first read of this effort from this news story, which contained in its last sentence one piece of interesting news having nothing to do with Tiangong-1:

The next such launch [of a Chinese space station module] will be of the Tianhe core module around 2019 on a new Long March 5B rocket, the country’s largest and most powerful so far. [emphasis mine]

It appears China has quietly renamed its big Long March 5 rocket, adding a “B” to the name. This name change strongly indicates what I have suspected for months, that the July launch failure has required China to significantly redesign the rocket. Apparently, the poor performance of the rocket’s first stage engines was caused by fundamental design problems.

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Senate kills military “Space Corps”

9:38 am

As part of this year’s military budget bill, the Senate has eliminated a House proposal that the military create a new military branch called the “Space Corps.”

The bill also completely overhauls the management of the military’s space effort, as described in detail here.

The NDAA conference report blasts the Air Force for a “broken national security space enterprise,” strips key authorities from the service and shifts much of the management of military space to the deputy secretary of defense.

The second link focuses on the management changes, while the first reviews in great detail the Senate’s budget proposals, which (surprise, surprise!) give the military more money.

In addition to changes in space-related policy, the bill would also fully authorize a pay increase for service members, increase missile defense, and add additional ships and aircraft. “The bill fully funds the 2.4% pay raise our troops are entitled to under law while blocking the President’s ability to reduce troop pay,” according to the summary.

It authorizes funding for a wide variety of additional military hardware including 90 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters across the service branches — 20 more than requested by President Donald Trump’s initial budget — and three additional Littoral Combat Ships.

The bill also “adds $4.4 billion above the President’s initial budget request to meet critical missile defense needs” — authorizing up to 28 additional ground-based Interceptors and “requiring the Missile Defense Agency to develop a space-based sensor layer for ballistic missile defense,” according to the summary.

However, the bill would also set defense spending well above the $549 billion cap under the Budget Control Act [sequestration] and Senate Democrats have vowed to block major increases to defense spending without equal increases for domestic programs.

I am not sure what to make of the management changes, though I like the elimination of the Space Corps, which was an absurd waste of money. The proposed budget increases are disturbing, however. I am especially appalled (but not surprised) at the push to eliminate sequestration, which has been the only bill passed by Republicans that has done anything to control the federal governments wasteful spending.

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New study confirms the cost effectiveness of commercial crew

8:18 pm

Capitalism in space: A new study shows that the commercial private cargo capsules are far more efficient then the space shuttle was in delivering cargo to ISS.

According to the new research paper by Edgar Zapata, who works at Kennedy Space Center, the supply services offered by SpaceX and Orbital ATK have cost NASA two to three times less than if the space agency had continued to fly the space shuttle. For his analysis, Zapata attempted to make an “apples to apples” comparison between the commercial vehicles, through June 2017, and the space shuttle.

Specifically, the analysis of development and operational expenses, as well as vehicle failures, found that SpaceX had cost NASA about $89,000 per kg of cargo delivered to the space station. By the same methodology, he found Orbital ATK had cost $135,000 per kg. Had the shuttle continued to fly, and deliver cargo via its Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, it would have cost $272,000 per kg.

…The detailed study then attempts to calculate the costs of the commercial cargo and crew programs combined, comparing that total to continued shuttle flights, which could carry both supplies and astronauts at the same time. Zapata’s best estimate is that the commercial programs cost only about 37 to 39 percent of what it would have cost NASA to continue the space shuttle program.

The benefits of the private programs go beyond cost savings, however. With multiple providers, NASA now has redundancy in case of a failure of supply lines to the space station. And there are indirect benefits as well, especially from supporting the efforts of US companies to develop new spacefaring technologies.

None of this is really news. There was once a time in the U.S. where these facts were understood without much thought. Americans once knew that private enterprise, competition, and freedom always work better than government-imposed projects. Today however we live in a post-freedom America, where the idea of depending on Americans to use their innovative talents freely to get things done is considered oppressive and racist, and must be squelched by a much wiser government.

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Surprise! First unmanned launch of SLS might be delayed until 2020

8:05 pm

Yawn. NASA admitted today that the first unmanned launch of SLS, set for December 2019, might be delayed until June 2020.

NASA’s review considered challenges related to building the SLS rocket’s core stage, issues with constructing Orion’s first European service module and tornado damage at the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, NASA officials said in a statement.

“While the review of the possible manufacturing and production schedule risks indicate a launch date of June 2020, the agency is managing to December 2019,” Acting NASA Administrator Robert Lightfoot said in a statement. “Since several of the key risks identified have not been actually realized, we are able to put in place mitigation strategies for those risks to protect the December 2019 date,” Lightfoot added.

Gee, only yesterday I thought I was going out on a limb to say that the first manned flight of SLS wouldn’t happen until 2024. It looks like I wasn’t going very far out on that limb. If the first unmanned mission doesn’t happen until June 2020, the next SLS launch (using its own second stage for the first time) cannot happen until around April 2023. That mission will likely be unmanned, launching Europa Clipper. The third SLS flight, as yet unbudgeted by Congress, would then fly humans, and will likely be scheduled for 2024, though I am certain that will be an unrealistic launch date.

More likely the first manned flight of SLS will not occur before 2025, twenty-one years after George Bush first proposed it and fourteen years after the last shuttle flight. By that time the cost for this boondoggle will have risen to more than $50 billion.

2025 is about seven years in the future. I will also bet in that time both SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets will have become operational, with both flying manned capsules. In fact, I expect them both to send human capsules to the Moon several times before SLS even gets its first manned flight off the ground. And they will do it for about a tenth the cost.

So obviously, our Congress and President know what to do! They are going to double down on SLS, pouring more money into this black hole, while making another decade of false promises about it that will never be fulfilled. Based on everything I have read coming from NASA and the National Space Council, I would be fooling myself to think otherwise.

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Engine failure for SpaceX upgraded Merlin engine during static test

7:50 pm

Capitalism in space: An upgraded Block 5 Merlin engine, undergoing static fire testing at SpaceX’s Texas test facility, experienced what the company is calling “an anomaly.”

The current generation of engines, known as Block IV, have not been impacted by the failure and will continue to fly payloads for SpaceX customers, meaning the incident will not affect this or next year’s launches. That includes next Wednesday’s planned launch of a secretive payload for Northrop Grumman from Kennedy Space Center’s pad 39A.

“We are now conducting a thorough and fully transparent investigation of the root cause,” SpaceX told FLORIDA TODAY. “SpaceX is committed to our current manifest and we do not expect this to have any impact on our launch cadence.” A company spokesperson said the anomaly occurred when liquid oxygen was being loaded into the engine during an operation known as a “LOX drop.” The tests are designed to root out any cracks or leaks in the engines.

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Driverless shuttle crashes on first day

4:24 pm

Only hours after initiating service, a driverless shuttle in Las Vegas crashed.

No one was hurt, nor is the accident described in any detail at the link. However, I think this incident highlights a reality about driverless cars: Either every vehicle on the road must be one, or none of the vehicles on the road can be one. It will be almost impossible to program a driverless car to handle the unpredictability of human drivers. If we want to leave the driving to computers (which I don’t), we will have to ban humans from driving.

Such a ban will be a terrible loss of freedom. And not surprisingly, I think the whole a push for driverless vehicles is a push in that direction.

I found a second article that describes the incident as caused by a truck driver backing into the shuttle, thus blaming the human driver (who was given a ticket by the way) and using the incident to argue against human drivers.

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