Northrop Grumman successfully used its Antares rocket to launch its Cygnus freighter to ISS today.
The capsule will dock with ISS in two days.
The 2021 launch race:
5 SpaceX
3 China
2 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Virgin Orbit
1 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. now leads China 8 to 3 in the national rankings.
An evening pause: It is almost impossible to see this as it really is.
The song, Tanz, was written by a German named Hiss. Though the music sounds Cajun, its roots are German.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Just over a month ago long time and very successful talk radio host Robert Pratt found himself suddenly fired by the corporation that managed the Texas radio stations where his show aired.
By all measures, it appeared the reason for the cancellation of his show was because he happened to be conservative and had dared report on the numerous creditable allegations of vote tampering during the November 3rd elections.
His firing ended up to be one of the first of my daily “Today’s Blacklisted American” posts, and in fact inspired the series.
Pratt however is, like me, not one to take oppression or blacklisting sitting down. He has now begun a regular podcast, and had me on as a guest today. We did several different podcasts, two of which are now available. The first on the landing Perseverance is part of a longer podcast and is available here. In the second, available here, we talked at length about the passing of Rush Limbaugh and his significance in American history.
A third podcast, on the modern culture of blacklisting will be posted next week.
Pratt is doing what I have done for years. When blocked by petty tyrants and close-minded thugs, you find an alternative route to reach your audience, and use it. You don’t simply complain, you make those jack-booted bullies squirm because their attempt to silence you is a failure.
All power to Robert Pratt. As a podcast his reach could actually be larger than when his broadcasts were confined to local Texas radio stations. And wouldn’t that be sweet?
Click for full image.
Time for another cool Martian image. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on January 3, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The section I have focused on is a single crater about a mile and a half wide.
What makes this crater interesting is the material that appears piled up against the crater’s northern half. Furthermore, both the floor of the crater as well as this piled up material looks like it is eroding away, kind of like a block of ice which is having warm water sprayed on it.
So, is this glacial ice?
» Read more
They’re coming for you next: Two lawyers — who did what any good lawyer should do when they accepted the job of defending Donald Trump during the recent Democratic Party impeachment show trial — have now found themselves subjected to harassment, death threats, and blacklisting with the loss of work.
First there is attorney Michael van der Leen. His house was vandalized with smashed windows and ugly slogans painted on the driveway after he spoke as defense attorney for Trump during the impeachment.
Because of the violence and threats, van der Leen has been forced to hire armed guards and move his wife and children to a secret location.
Equally egregious treatment has been handed out to Trump attorney David Schoen:
An attorney who represented President Donald Trump during the recent impeachment trial says a law school canceled a civil rights law course he was going to teach and he was suspended from a civil rights lawyer email discussion list.
“I was hoping to teach a civil rights course at a law school in the fall. We’ve been in talks about it, kind of planning it out. I wrote to them and I said, ‘I want you to know, I’m gonna be representing Donald Trump in the impeachment case. I don’t know if that impacts on your decision at all,’” David Schoen, one of the three attorneys who argued before the Senate, told The Epoch Times.
“And they said, you know, they appreciated my writing and, frankly, it would make some students and faculty uncomfortable, so I couldn’t do it.
There once was a time that the left in America trumpeted the importance of every American having the right to an attorney. Now, not so much. If you are accused of badness by the left, you are required to accept that accusation as true without a fight, and anyone who dares comes forward to defend you has joined you in that badness and must therefore be destroyed as well.
Or to put it another way, to the left you are no longer innocent until proven guilty. If they accuse you of something, you are automatically guilty, and no trial is needed. And anyone who disagrees is automatically guilty as well, and must be hounded and blackballed.
I wonder who has said this before? In a scathing Bloomberg editorial yesterday, the news service called for President Biden to scrap the Space Launch System (SLS) and let private enterprise do the job instead.
The editorial’s opening sentence will sound very familiar to regular readers at this website:
Why is the U.S. government building a space rocket? In particular, why is it building a space rocket that has cost nearly $20 billion and counting, is years behind schedule, relies on outdated technology, suffers by comparison to private-sector alternatives, and has little justification to begin with?
That a major leftwing news source is beginning to endorse private enterprise and lambast SLS is a further sign that the political winds are blowing hard against this giant wasteful boondoggle. Should anything at all go wrong in its upcoming test schedule expect to see more such calls, coming from even more unlikely and unexpected places.
The lumbering thick-headed Washington political community is beginning to finally move towards the right conclusion, only a decade late.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
» Read more
An evening pause: Hat tip Mike Nelson, who adds this tidbit of the song’s history:
The lyrics are about Adam and Eve living “In the Garden of Eden” but Doug Ingles, the composer, consumed an entire gallon of wine the night he wrote it, and when he sang it to a bandmate to transcribe the lyrics he slurred words so badly it got transcribed as In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida instead, which in the end stuck.
The rover Perseverance has successfully landed in Jezero Crater on Mars.
The picture to the right is a screen capture of everyone cheering in the control room on hearing the good news.
The second image is the first image beamed back, from the rover’s hazard camera used mostly for guiding it in future travels. The haze is from the dust kicked up during landing.
The engineering narrator indicated that they also know exactly where the rover landed, and it is a good location, but NASA’s live stream appears uninterested in telling us this critical information. Right now they are spending time blathering on with more NASA propaganda.
I should get this information during the post-landing press conference, which begins at 5:30 (Eastern).
UPDATE: The press conference started 30 minutes late, and then spent the first 25 minutes letting the top NASA managers claim credit for everything. Then we finally got to hear from actual mission managers to tell us where the rover landed and what should happen next.
» Read more
They’re coming for you next: Because of a single hit piece falsely claiming that a forum run by the long-established science fiction publishing company Baen Books was “fomenting insurrection” (the new buzzword of the brainless left being used to silence dissent), the publisher’s web-based operations were threatened with shutdown.
As a result Baen was forced to close-down, it says temporarily, that forum.
Yesterday some nobody, wannabe writer, social justice twit released a hit piece “expose” about how posters on Baen’s Bar were fomenting insurrection or some such nonsense. It was the usual [expletive deleted] hit piece (the sad part is, by saying the usual, half the country immediately knows exactly what I’m talking about). It was lots of pearl clutching over regular people not toeing their arbitrary political lines, misquotes, errors, quotes taken out of context, and some flat out lies.
However, this was clearly part of a coordinated attack in order to materially harm our business, because immediately after the hit piece was released complaints were filed with the various internet companies Baen uses for services to pressure them into kicking us off the internet. This hit piece was presented as “evidence”. Without going into details the companies then contacted Baen about these “serious allegations” so last night Baen temporarily took down the Bar forum to protect the rest of the company from being deplatformed.
The link provides lots of background, including the publisher’s response and statements of support from a number of published authors from across the political spectrum.
The internet companies who immediately kow-towed to these storm-troopers and threatened Baen Books deserve nothing but contempt. If they were truly American, they would have told the complainants to go jump in a lake. Don’t like what people are writing in the Baen forum? Either join the conversation and refute what they are writing, or go somewhere else. Don’t try to blackball someone just because you disagree with them.
Instead, these corporate internet platforms joined the two-minute hate and threatened Baen with blacklisting. To my mind the people at those platforms are not Americans, but narrow-minded petty dictators who either like oppressing people who disagree with them or live in constant cowardly fear which requires them to join the mob when it seeks violent retribution.
We need to know who these internet platforms are. Now. This will allow free Americans to begin searching for alternatives.
And if we don’t get those alternatives we will soon face a situation where any complaint against a publisher will lead to that publisher being shut down and its books flushed down the toilet, simply because someone doesn’t like them.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The image to the right, reduced to post here, was a captioned release today by the science team of the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is located in Deuteronilus Mensae, a region of chaos terrain in the transition zone between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands that is also part of a 2,000 mile-long band that I call Mars’ glacier country. From the caption, written by Dan Berman, senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona:
Lobate debris aprons are commonly found surrounding dissected plateaus in the Deuteronilus Mensae region of Mars. They have been interpreted as debris-covered glaciers and radar data have shown their interiors to be composed of pure ice.
The mound in this image is slightly removed from most of the other plateaus, and the [debris apron] surrounding it is highly degraded. The sharp scarps on the western and eastern sides of the mound indicate that a great deal of the ice once found in these landforms has since sublimated away, leaving behind these collapsed debris cliffs.
I wonder if further research might find an ice layer in those cliff walls, especially because this photo strongly suggests that much of this mound is made of ice that is sublimating away or has flowed downward to form the debris aprons as well as that central gully.
The overview map below shows its location in Deuteronilus Mensae as well as showing almost all of the entire band of Mars’ glacier country.
» Read more
Click for full image.
In touting the plans of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to someday launch a rover to Jezero Crater designed to pick up the cached samples that Perseverance is going to leave behind, NASA today published the map to the right, showing Perseverance’s planned driving routes in the crater, on the large delta that poured into the crater in the past, and beyond that crater.
The yellow lines indicate Perseverance’s planned route, beginning somewhere in that red landing ellipse. The green lines indicated the many proposed landing sites and pathways the proposed follow-on sample retrieval mission can take to grab Perseverance samples.
The planned route looks like they will spend a lot of time exploring the top of delta, then will move out of the crater and to the southwest towards what had been another candidate landing site for Perseverance, now dubbed the Midway ellipse.
What route the science team will eventually take at the delta depends greatly on exactly where Perseverance lands today. We will know more in only a few hours.
