Year: 2020

Happy Thanksgiving!

9:44 am

Today is Thanksgiving, a truly American holiday, as unique to history as the United States. No nation before this one ever tried to establish by law a nation dedicated to “the pursuit of happiness” and the premise that sovereignty resides solely in the people, not in an elitist upper class of rulers. This holiday was established to celebrate and give thanks for these ideals, and the blessings of liberty they bestow to Americans.

Those ideals are now threatened by the progressives who dominate the Democratic Party and the weasels in the Republican Party too cowardly to resist. It therefore becomes imperative that, as we American citizens celebrate this holiday today with family gatherings often in defiance of the edicts of these petty dictators, we resolve to defy them in all ways, and to reclaim with courage our heritage of freedom and the individual sovereignty it gives to us.

No one has the right to give us orders. Give thanks for that, and tell those who try they risk terrible things for themselves by doing so.

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Russian company proposes new Russian space station post-ISS

9:27 am

Energia, the division in Roscosmos that manages the Russian manned program, including its share of ISS, has proposed that Russia build its own space station after 2025, and the reasons it gives strongly suggest they are worried about the condition of their 20-year-old and leaking Zvezda module.

The International Space Station’s systems are likely to keep breaking down after 2025, Energia company, which manages the Russian module, said and suggested building a national station instead. “Russia has commitments regarding the ISS through 2025. Several elements are already seriously damaged and about to stop functioning. Many of them are impossible to replace. After 2025, we expect many ISS elements to start breaking down en masse,” the deputy director-general of Energia, Vladimir Soloviev, said at a meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences. [emphasis mine]

They don’t mention Zvezda by name, but the highlighted words point to it. Assuming the persistent leaks in the module are related to stress damage and age, this statement is recognizing publicly that replacing Zvezda is very difficult, or impossible, and that it is on the verge of complete failure.

Whether Russia has the money or resources to get another station built soon after 2025 is questionable, however. If they do decide to go it alone, I doubt they could launch a replacement before 2030, at the earliest, and likely much later than that.

If they do end the partnership with the U.S., it is unclear what happens to ISS. If the Russians choose to undock their portion of the station it will leave ISS somewhat crippled. It has been my impression that without all of the environmental systems in the Russian half, ISS cannot function. This might no longer be true, and will likely not be true with the planned arrival of Axiom’s private modules by the mid-20s. Timing however of all this remains critical.

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The coming purge

1:54 pm

Hitler's purge in 1934, the night of long knives
Hitler’s violent purge of his opponents in 1934: The Night of Long Knives.

I have just finished reading The Memo: 20 years inside the deep state fighting for America first. Written by military intelligence and national security expert Richard Higgins, it described his long and mostly fruitless effort in Washington to make our foreign military policy more effective.

In 2016, in desperation, he allied himself with Donald Trump, hoping that a victory by this very unconventional outsider might finally put Higgins in a position of some control.

It did not work out that way. At first the established players in Washington blocked his appointment. Eventually he managed to get an assignment at the National Security Council (NSC), but at a lower ranking than initially promised. Worse, the make-up of that council remained largely controlled by Democratic Party holdovers. As Higgins described things at the NSC in the first year after Trump’s inauguration:
» Read more

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Giant wind eddies in the sands of Mars

12:13 pm

Wind eddies on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was photographed by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on August 5, 2020. It shows a cluster of the crescent-shaped gullies, apparently carved from desert sand by the prevailing winds.

Those prevailing winds here are from the southwest to the northeast. As the wind blows the sand to the east, it hits a more solid object, such as a mountain buried in the sand, which forces the wind and the blown sand to go around, much as water passes a boulder in river rapids. That solid object also causes an eddy to form at its face, the wind forced downward and then around and up, carving out the gullies by lifting the sand at the base of that solid object. The result are these crescent gullies, dubbed blow-outs.

The overview map helps explain why there is so much sand here, enough apparently to bury whole mountains.
» Read more

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Starship 50,000 ft hop now scheduled for Nov 30th

8:35 am

Capitalism in space: Having completed all preliminary static fire tests, SpaceX has now set November 30th as the target date for 50,000 foot high hop for its eighth Starship prototype.

SpaceX is understood to be conducting a Flight Readiness Review (FRR) for the test flight, with this final Static Fire test providing key data to the final go to proceed towards SN8’s big day.

Elon Musk has already calibrated public expectations on the expected outcome of SN8’s test, noting that “understanding exactly how the body flaps control pitch, yaw & roll during descent, such that the ship is positioned well to relight, flip & land, would be a big win.” As opposed to expecting SN8 to land feet first on the landing pad.

Musk’s point is important. The primary engineering goal for this first hop will be to find out whether they truly understand how to control and fly Starship. Their knowledge in this area is only computer based, and thus is very incomplete, and could very well be wrong, resulting in a failure that prevents a proper clean landing.

Such as failure however would actually be an engineering success, as it would give them the data needed to make later prototypes work. As for landing, they know how to do that already. Once they get the flying right, the landing should follow.

SpaceX has said it will live stream that hop. Should be a thrill to watch.

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SpaceX sets numerous launch records in placing 60 more Starlink satellites in orbit

10:23 pm

Falcon 9 booster landing for a record 7th time

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight broke a whole bunch of new launch records in launching another sixty Starlink satellites into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket.

First, the leaders in the 2020 launch race:

31 China
22 SpaceX
12 Russia
5 ULA
5 Rocket Lab

The US now leads China 35 to 31 in the national rankings.

For SpaceX, this launch established the following landmarks for the company:
» Read more

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Chiquita Banana – The original commercial

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This will not mean anything to my younger readers, but this song and commercial seared itself into the brains of everyone who went to the movies or watched television in the 40s, 50s, and 60s. The first version, shown here, was produced by Disney for the United Fruit Company.

I can think of no reason not to sear this song into some new generations.

Hat tip David Nudelman.

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Rocket Lab declares first attempt at recovering a 1st stage a success

9:34 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab has announced that the company’s first effort to recover a 1st stage of its Electron rocket during a November 19th launch was a complete success.

On Rocket Lab’s latest launch Nov. 19, the rocket’s first stage made a controlled reentry after stage separation, then released a drogue and a main parachute before splashing down about 400 kilometers downrange from its New Zealand launch site, where it was recovered by a boat.

The recovery itself went as planned. “The test was a complete success,” Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, said in a call with reporters Nov. 23. “The stage splashed down completely intact. What it proved to us is that this is a feasible approach, and we’re really confident that we can make Electron a reusable launch vehicle from here.”

Eventually they plan to snatch the stage out of the air using a helicopter prior to hitting the water, but are presently focusing instead on developing the proper thermal protection and attitude control systems for the flight back to Earth. They are presently taking that first stage apart and analyzing what worked and didn’t work in protecting it during that flight.

According to Beck, they will do another splashdown recovery early in ’21 to refine things. They also hope to reuse some of the recovered components from both splashdown tests on later flights.

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New data makes past nova too bright, but not bright enough to be supernova

9:21 am

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers, using new data from the Gemini North ground-based telescope, have found that a star that brightened in 1670 and was labeled a nova is much farther away than previously thought, which means that 1670 eruption was far too powerful for a nova, but not powerful enough to make it a supernova.

By measuring both the speed of the nebula’s expansion and how much the outermost wisps had moved during the last ten years, and accounting for the tilt of the nebula on the night sky, which had been estimated earlier by others, the team determined that CK Vulpeculae lies approximately 10,000 light-years distant from the Sun — about five times as far away as previously thought. That implies that the 1670 explosion was far brighter, releasing roughly 25 times more energy than previously estimated [4]. This much larger estimate of the amount of energy released means that whatever event caused the sudden appearance of CK Vulpeculae in 1670 was far more violent than a simple nova.

“In terms of energy released, our finding places CK Vulpeculae roughly midway between a nova and a supernova,” commented Evans. “[T]he cause — or causes — of the outbursts of this intermediate class of objects remain unknown. I think we all know what CK Vulpeculae isn’t, but no one knows what it is.”

Recent research has also suggested that the cause of the eruption was not from the interaction of a binary system with one normal star and a white dwarf, as believed for decades, but possibly a binary system with a brown dwarf, or a red giant star, or two normal stars. All are remain possible, none however have been confirmed.

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