Year: 2017

Russia lowers its Proton launch plans for 2017

8:52 am

Though they are about to resume Proton launches, Russia today revealed that they only intend to launch the rocket five times in 2017, not seven as announced earlier.

Russia plans five Proton-M carrier rocket launches this year, including three commercial launches, Khrunichev Space Center CEO Andrei Kalinovsky told TASS on Wednesday. “Our plans for this year also additionally include four Proton-M carrier rocket launches. These are two commercial launches with Amazonas 5 and AsiaSat 9 satellites, and also two federal launches,” the chief executive said.

Even more interesting, the article notes that Russia only has contracts to launch 15 commercial satellites through 2023. That’s a launch rate of only about 2.5 to 3 commercial Proton launches per year, a rate that seems much less than in the past. Moreover, while they say they haven’t lost any customers in the past year, it also appears they haven’t gotten any either.

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Climate scientists increasingly show no warming in peer review papers

10:19 pm

The uncertainty of science: Climate scientists are increasingly publishing papers that show no clear temperature global trend.

Last year there were at least 60 peer-reviewed papers published in scientific journals demonstrating that Today’s Warming Isn’t Global, Unprecedented, Or Remarkable.

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Just within the last 5 months, 58 more papers and 80 new graphs have been published that continue to undermine the popularized conception of a slowly cooling Earth temperature history followed by a dramatic hockey-stick-shaped uptick, or an especially unusual global-scale warming during modern times.
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Yes, some regions of the Earth have been warming in recent decades or at some point in the last 100 years. Some regions have been cooling for decades at a time. And many regions have shown no significant net changes or trends in either direction relative to the last few hundred to thousands of years.
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Succinctly, then, scientists publishing in peer-reviewed journals have increasingly affirmed that there is nothing historically unprecedented or remarkable about today’s climate when viewed in the context of long-term natural variability. [emphasis in original]

At the link are 80 graphs from the most recent papers. Take a look. If you are convinced that the climate is warming than you must come up with an explanation for this data. Or you can put your fingers in your ears, cover your eyes, and chant “La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la!” as loud as you can so that you don’t have to deal with it.

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China to ramp up manned missions to build space station

5:10 pm

In order to build its space station, beginning in 2019, China will increase its manned mission rate, completing four missions in five years.

This is still a somewhat glacial pace, compared to other nations. It will seem even slower based on what I expect will start happening once a number of competitive private American rockets begin hauling tourists into space.

The article notes one additional tidbit about China’s station. They plan to run 3 to 6 month long missions there.

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Jupiter gets two more moons

4:51 pm

Astronomers using ground-based telescopes have identified two more moon circling Jupiter, bringing its total now to 69.

Both of these discoveries, as with the vast majority of Jupiter’s moons, occupy retrograde orbits, with inclinations greater than 90°, meaning that they move in directions opposite that of the planet’s spin. These distant, irregular orbits imply that these bodies formed elsewhere in the outer solar system and were captured while passing by early in the planet’s history.

A number of the moons recently discovered have since been lost because their orbits were too poorly constrained. However, some of these lost moons have also be recovered.

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Air Force awards SpaceX contract to launch next X-37B mission

4:47 pm

Capitalism in space: The Air Force has awarded SpaceX the contract to launch the next X-37B mission, presently scheduled to launch in August.

The contract amount was not announced, but it certainly is going to be less than ULA charged for its own launches of the X-37B. Also, this launch is scheduled only two months hence, which means SpaceX has to somehow wedge it into its already crowded schedule.

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Imans in UK refuse to say prayers for terrorists

4:24 pm

It is about time: More than 130 Muslim religious leaders in the United Kingdom are refusing to perform funeral rites for the terrorists who attacked people this past Saturday on London Bridge.

The decision by the Muslim leaders was seen as an “unprecedented” move because the funeral ritual is typically performed on a deceased Muslim no matter the person’s past actions. The group of religious leaders have urged others to join them in declining to pray for the dead killers.

“We, as Muslim imams and religious leaders, condemn the recent terror attacks in Manchester and London in the strongest terms possible,” the Muslim leaders said in a statement. “Coming from a range of backgrounds, and from across the U.K.; feeling the pain the rest of the nation feels, we have come together to express our shock and utter disgust at these cold-blooded murders. We are deeply hurt that a spate of terror attacks have been committed in our country once more by murderers who seek to gain religious legitimacy for their actions. We seek to clarify that their reprehensible actions have neither legitimacy nor our sympathy.”

So, does this mean they had no problems with performing rites for the terrorists of earlier attacks, such as at Westminster earlier this year and the July 7 attacks several years ago? Meh.

I must say that though this is the right response on their part, I am not very impressed. For more that two decades the Islamic community in the west has sat on its hands, making believe they have nothing to do with Islamic terrorism, or quietly supporting it by non-action. They are suddenly realizing now that people are losing patience with them, and that their safe havens in the west are now increasingly threatened. Most politicians might still be mouthing platitudes of “We have to all get along,” but the public is increasingly angry and demanding action, even if it means kicking every Islamic practitioner back to the Middle East.

Thus, though I do not like attacking people with such broad strokes, I can understand why it is happening. And the Muslim community has no one to blame but themselves.

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The atomic rocket that never was

11:19 am

Link here. The article is filled with overstatements and even a few outright errors, such as in the second paragraph when it makes the false assertion that SLS will be “the largest booster ever built.” (The Saturn 5 was more powerful. So was the Soviet Union’s Energia.)

Furthermore, the key to understanding how minor and inconsequencial Project Orion was is to note the total amount of money spent: only $10.5 million. This was merely a design study, something that NASA did (and still does) routinely, most of which never get beyond power-point presentations. Project Orion was similar, never reaching project stage. If it had been done today it would have also been nothing more than a power point presentation.

I also remember when this whole concept got cancelled and was revealed. No one took it seriously, since everyone understood that the technology available in the 1960s was simply not ready for such a project.

Nonetheless, it is interesting reading, especially since the technology today is significantly advanced. We might actually be approaching a time where this concept can finally move to design and construction.

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Fascism at Emerson College

9:22 am

Link here. This includes threats of violence, blacklisting, and bad grades for conservative students. One student has left the school after one year because of the harassment.

The worse aspect of this however is that most of the ill-treatment is coming from students. While the administration simply looks the other way, these future leaders of our society harass, oppress, and attack a dissenting minority, merely because of their opinions.

Even so, the very fact that the administration seems to care so little about reigning in this fascist behavior should be a reason for parents and college-bound students to consider attending a different college. As the student who is fleeing the school noted in the second link above:

She’s said she feels disappointed with [Emerson President Lee] Pelton’s response to her situation and a lack of serious consequences for the students involved. “When it comes to the bigger picture, is the school responding well? No. Not really. They don’t feel the need to stand up for us, because they aren’t too many of us,” she said.

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Jupiter’s cloud-tops, up close

4:16 pm

Jupiter's cloud tops

Cool image time! On the right is a cropped and reduced resolution section from this image from Juno. It shows the top of some of Jupiter’s clouds, swirling about chaotically.

What I find most fascinating is how this image reveals the different elevations of some of these cloud belts. The swirling clouds on the left and bottom of the image are clearly higher than the dark areas to the top and right. They are in fact casting their shadows on those lower cloud-tops.

To really understand the interactions taking place here, however, will require satellites capable of continually tracking these clouds over time. Unfortunately, Juno cannot do this. Though it will provide us periodic snapshots of specific areas, its long 53-day orbit means that it will not return to view the same areas very frequently. Making movies of the evolution of these clouds will be difficult, if not impossible.

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