Milton Berle & Harpo Marx – I’m forever blowing bubbles
An evening pause: Time for some silliness. From live television 1959.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Year: 2018
Air Force issues bid requests for five future launches
Capitalism in space: The Air Force has issued a new request for bids on five future satellite launches, with SpaceX and ULA to compete for each.
The Air Force on Wednesday released a final request for proposals for Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) launch services for two National Reconnaissance Office payloads, the fifth Space-Based Infrared System geosynchronous Earth orbit satellite, an Air Force Space Command mission dubbed AFSPC-44 and a secret surveillance mission code-named SilentBarker.
Proposals are due April 16 and contracts are expected to be awarded in late 2018.
…The existence of SilentBarker surfaced last year during a House Armed Services Committee strategic forces subcommittee hearing when Gen. John Raymond, commander of Air Force Space Command, explained that the Air Force and the NRO were developing a “space situational awareness architecture” to help improve the protection of satellites from enemy attacks. SilentBarker is the name of the program.
Why do I have the sneaking suspicion that SilentBarker and Zuma have something to do with each other?
Anti-Trump FBI officials discussed ways to avoid transparency requirements
Newly released texts between the anti-Trump FBI officials Peter Strzok and Lisa Page show that they discussed ways in which they could evade regulations that made their communications public records.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok and FBI lawyer Lisa Page discussed getting new Apple iPhones, in lieu of their Samsung 5 government issued phones in text messages they exchanged in August 2016. They noted in the texts that the new phones would help keep their text messages from government collection after speaking with the FBI’s IT director, according to newly released August 2016 text messages.
“According to text messages produced by the committee, Ms. Page and Mr. Strzok make references to communicating with other FBI employees via text message, phone call, email, and voice mail,” stated Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Sen. Ron Johnson, in a letter dated Jan. 31, to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. “Additional text messages suggest that FBI officials used non-official email accounts and messaging programs to communicate about official business.”
The article includes some texts, such as this juicy tidbit:
Strzok: “Hot damn. I’m happy to pilot that…we get around our security/monitoring issues?”
Page: “No, he’s proposing that we just stop following them. Apparently, the requirement to capture texts came from omb, but we’re the only org (I’m told) who is following that rule. His point is, if no one else is doing it why should we.”
Not only were these officials apparently conspiring to sabotage the election, they were eager to break basic transparency laws to do it.
Time for my annual birthday fund-raising campaign
As is obvious at the top of the page, I have today started my annual birthday request for donations or subscriptions to Behind The Black.
Please consider donating or subscribing to the website. Every dollar helps, even if it is as little as a $2 monthly subscription. Or you can consider instead buying either of my ebooks, Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, or Pioneer, both available either here at these links or from any bookseller.
Your contributions not only make it possible for my independent reporting on space, science, and culture to continue, it also keeps this page and its comment section alive. In the past four years that comment section has matured into a place where readers have a chance to exchange their vibrant and knowledgeable thoughts about the news I report here. I am continually impressed by the ideas expressed there by my readers. Help keep it going by donating to this site!
Cape Town about to run out of water
The coming dark age: Cape Town in South Africa will run out of water on April 16 if it does not rain soon.
Officials estimate that if water levels continue to fall as expected, South Africa’s second most populous city will run out of water by April 16, which has been dubbed “Day Zero.” Experts are keeping a close eye on daily consumption in a desperate bid to avoid the disaster, warning residents tempted to ignore measures that they face fines and the installation of water-management meters if they do not comply.
It may seem unthinkable that a developed city of four million could run out of water but it’s been a slow-burning catastrophe exacerbated by some uncontrollable factors. Cape Town been enduring the worst drought in a century for the past three years. A changing climate and rapidly growing population have made matters worse. And as the crisis has taken hold, Capetonians have not been doing enough to curb their water use, further aggravating the scarcity. Only an estimated 55% of the city’s residents are actually sticking to their allotted water per day, according to last week’s figures issued by authorities.
The city is now working to upgrade its water systems — rushing to build desalination, aquifer and water-recycling projects — and help stretch the current supply, but officials say residents need to step up, too. [emphasis mine]
It is interesting to me that this CNN article seems to downplay the South African government’s lack of planning while instead focusing on the failure of residents to ration themselves. The real scoop here however is this: “Why did the government let this situation get to this point?” Such incompetence should have been the highlight of the article, and in the past would have been. Now, the journalists at CNN feel obliged instead to make excuses for them.
A SpaceX expansion at Boca Chica spaceport?
SpaceX’s request to the Texas government for an additional $5 million commitment might be because the company wants to expand on its original plans for its Boca Chica spaceport, and needs additional infrastructure work from the local authorities.
State Rep. René Oliveira, D-Brownsville, said SpaceX asked legislators to set aside funds to support space-related companies and operations in the state, though the money would not be specifically earmarked for SpaceX or the Boca Chica project. The company also has a rocket development facility in McGregor.
Oliveira, who helped assemble a coalition of key legislators to secure the $5 million in development aid, said some of the money might be used to support rocket operations beyond what SpaceX previously has said it wants to do at Boca Chica. “About a year ago, SpaceX came to me with their concept of a new, larger, expanded plan for Boca Chica Beach,” Oliveira said. “The concept went well beyond conducting launches, and would require new commitments for construction, investment and jobs to support the new operations.”
This could simply be a lobbying technique by Oliveira to get more money. Or it could be because SpaceX has actually decided to expand its plans for Boca Chica, which has the advantage over Florida in that the company would have no scheduling conflicts as the spaceport would be theirs entirely.
Russia successfully completes first 2018 launch, from Vostochny
Russia today successfully placed two Earth resource satellites plus nine smallsats into orbit, using their Soyuz 2 rocket launching from their new spaceport in Vostochny.
This was the second successful launch from Vostochny, out of three total.
The 2018 launch standings:
5 China
2 SpaceX
2 ULA
1 Russia
1 Europe
1 Rocket Lab
1 India
1 Japan
New Zimmerman op-ed: NASA’s safety bureaucracy sabotaging manned space
The website American Greatness has now published a new op-ed I have written that describes how the bureaucracy at NASA is acting to sabotage commercial space, even as it ignores far more significant safety issues with SLS and Orion.
I was prompted to write the op-ed after reading the reports in the past few weeks by NASA’s safety panel and the GAO, both of which clearly favored NASA’s bloated projects.
What both reports actually demonstrate is that the bureaucrats in Washington have very little interest in safety, but instead are more focused on putting their thumbs on the scale in order specifically to harm these private efforts—especially SpaceX’s. One report in particular, by NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), was especially hostile to these private efforts, even as it remained completely unconcerned about similar but far worse safety issues that exist with NASA’s government-built and competing SLS and Orion programs.
Both reports also illustrated starkly the complete lack of understanding that the Washington community has for the nature of exploration, the very task that NASA was founded to spearhead. The result is a bureaucratic culture that makes the manned exploration of space by the United States practically impossible.
If things do not change, expect this country to be bypassed in the coming decades by the rest of the world as the solar system is colonized and settled.
Check it out.
Falcon 9 first stage survives splashdown
The controlled splashdown of today’s Falcon 9 first stage was apparently so gentle that the stage survived intact and has been photographed floating at sea.
SpaceX says it plans to tow the stage back and try to salvage it. According to Musk, they were testing “a very high retrothrust” during the landing, whatever that means.
Gustav Holst – St Paul’s Suite
An evening pause: Performed by the Eufonico String Orchestra, Rafał Nicze, conductor, as part of the 3rd Polish Nationwide Music Schools’ Symphonic Orchestras Competition, May 19, 2015.
The music here is soooo British, as it should be, written by Holst in honor of the St Paul’s Girls’ School where Holst was Director of Music for almost thirty years.
SpaceX successfully launches Luxembourg’s first government satellite
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched Luxembourg’s first government satellite, GovSat 1.
The launch used a previously flown first stage, which was intentionally not recovered on this flight. They did however land it in the ocean, probably to simply practice the entire routine.
The 2018 launch standings:
5 China
2 SpaceX
2 ULA
1 Rocket Lab
1 Europe
1 India
1 Japan
This launch puts the U.S. and China in a tie for the lead. I must also note that the world’s aerospace industry completed 13 launches in the first month of 2018. If this pace is maintained, we shall see about 150 launches in 2018, the most since before 1980, and possible the most in a single year ever. (I need to check the records for the 1970s, as it is possible but very unlikely this number was topped during that time.)
Fractures in the floor of Occator Crater
Cool image time! The Dawn science team has released an image of Ceres, cropped to post here in the right, that shows a spiderweb of fractures radiating out from a single point in the floor of Occator Crater.
These fractures have been interpreted as evidence that material came up from below and formed a dome shape, as if a piston was pushing Occator’s floor from beneath the surface. This may be due to the upwelling of material coming from Ceres’ deep interior. An alternative hypothesis is that the deformation is due to volume changes inside a reservoir of icy magma in the shallow subsurface that is in the process of freezing, similar to the change in volume that a bottle of water experiences when put in a freezer.
In the image sunlight is coming from the right. This fractured area can be seen in this earlier simulated oblique image of Occator Crater, in the southwest corner of the crater floor, well away from the crater’s more well known bright areas.