Year: 2017

North Korea’s new plan to develop and launch satellites

12:16 am

North Korea announced yesterday a new program to accelerate the development of home-built space satellites and orbital rockets.

North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a commentary laying out the country’s plans to send more satellites into space over the next five years. The program “can contribute to improving the economy and people’s lives,” the article reads. “It is a global trend to seek economic development through space programs,” the October 31 piece said. “According to our five-year plan for space development, we will launch more working satellites, such as geostationary ones.” Geostationary satellites orbit the Earth about 38,500 kilometers (22,000 miles) over a fixed position over the equator and revolve from west to east like the Earth.

It is hard to know how realistic this program is, and how much of it is actually a cover for North Korea’s ICBM development efforts.

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Saudi Arabia gives robot citizenship

10:36 am

As part of a publicity stunt to encourage investment, Saudi Arabia has given citizenship to a new robot, designed to show human emotions by facial expressions.

A humanoid robot took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative yesterday and had an amusing exchange with the host to the delight of hundreds of delegates. Smartphones were held aloft as Sophia, a robot designed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, gave a presentation that demonstrated her capacity for human expression.

Sophia made global headlines when she was granted Saudi citizenship, making the kingdom the first country in the world to offer its citizenship to a robot.

Below the fold I have embedded the video of Sophia’s conversation with the host. It is obvious that most of the conversation was scripted. It is also obvious that robots still have a long way to go before their facial expressions appear natural to the human eye.

Posted north of Phoenix as we climb up onto the Colorado Plateau. Just saw the last saguaro in the cacti’s northern range limits.
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Chinese company gives live turtle a high altitude balloon flight

9:00 am

Capitalism in space: Chinese company has successful given a live turtle a high altitude balloon flight as prep for future tourism flights.

The news article is somewhat humorous in claiming the following:

Shenzhen-based Kuang-Chi Group said it blasted the yellow-headed turtle, nicknamed “Little Cloud”, to an altitude of 21,000 metres inside a helium-filled craft. The launch took place from western China’s Xinjiang region at about 4am on Wednesday morning.

The craft landed safely at about 8.28am the same day, and the turtle was said to have survived the trip.

The company said it was the first time a live animal had been safely taken into near space, and that the trip paved the way for it to sell commercial flights to humans by 2018 or 2019. [emphasis mine]

The company’s claim, highlighted above, is so incredibly not true it raises questions about their whole story. Humans have been taken by balloon to these elevations several times. This might be a poor translation, but then it indicates some incompetence by the reporter.

Either way, this company is aiming for the high altitude tourism market that World View in Tucson had initially been focusing on, but now seems to have abandoned.

Posted as we slog our way through Phoenix traffic.

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SpaceX to resume launches at second launchpad in December

8:18 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX plans to resume launches in December at its second Kennedy launchpad that was damaged in the September 2016 explosion.

This means that after the mid-November launch of Northrop Grumman’s Zuma payload, they will begin the reconfiguration of that launchpad for Falcon Heavy. Initially the company had said it would take two months to complete that work, which would push the first Falcon Heavy launch into 2018. More recently they say they can get the work done in six weeks. Either way, this suggests that the first attempt to launch Falcon Heavy around the first of the year.

Posted on the road from Tucson to the Grand Canyon. This weekend I am running a new cave survey project there, and we are hiking down this afternoon, with the plan to hike out on Monday.]

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Survey finds universities teach a “thin and patchy education”

11:41 am

The coming dark age: A national survey has found that today’s universities no longer teach a well-rounded education but instead allow their students to skip important subjects so that their education is “thin and patchy.”

The group evaluated more than 1,100 colleges and universities based on their requirements in seven “key areas of knowledge”: composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics and science. The results showed that 66.5 percent of the schools required only three or fewer of those subjects.

This leads to a “thin and patchy education,” the report states. “Students may have dozens or even hundreds of courses from which to choose, many of them highly specialized niche courses,” it states. “Once distribution requirements become too loose, students almost inevitably graduate with an odd list of random, unconnected courses and, all too often, serious gaps in their basic skills and knowledge.”

Additional key findings include that fewer than 18 percent of colleges and universities require a foundational course in U.S. government or history, and only about 3 percent of the institutions require students to take a basic economics class.

Read it all. It is quite depressing, but also not surprising. It also suggests that parents and their high school children need to demand more from colleges, and reject those colleges that are failing in providing the basics of a college education.

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