China today used its Long March 4C rocket to place three military reconnaissance satellites into orbit.
The 2021 launch race:
3 SpaceX
2 China
1 Rocket Lab
1 Virgin Orbit
The U.S. still leads China 5 to 2 in the national rankings.
An evening pause: Some technical rock music history.
Hat tip lazurus long.
Capitalism in space? It is now confirmed that the test flight of SpaceX’s ninth prototype of its Starship rocket was scrubbed because of the FAA’s refusal to approve the license. To quote the FAA:
We will continue working with SpaceX to resolve outstanding safety issues before we approve the next test flight.
Typically vague bureaucratic language. There is no word on why the government did this. The flight of Starship prototype #8 proved SpaceX has full control over its vehicle, to the point they could put it down right on target. Why the FAA should now suddenly get cold feet is inexplicable.
There is one difference between now and the December 9th flight of Starship prototype #8. Then the president was Republican Donald Trump, and the Senate was controlled by the Republicans. Now the president is Democrat Joe Biden, and both houses of Congress are in Democratic Party control. It would not surprise me in the least if some Biden officials called the FAA and demanded they impose stricter safety restrictions on SpaceX, and that they did so at the very last minute.
Or to put it another way, someone in the Biden administration essentially wanted to tell SpaceX, “Nice rocket company you got here. Sure would be a shame if something happened to it.”
LabPadre’s Starship 24/7 live feed, at 8:12 am (Central), January 28, 2021.
Click to go to it.
BUMPED AND UPDATED: It is now confirmed that the launch was scrubbed by the FAA’s refusal to approve the license. Though SpaceX seemed to go through a fueling and countdown procedure, they have since detanked the ship.
UPDATE: It appears from several live feeds that they have scrubbed today’s launch because of high winds, and will try again tomorrow. There are also rumors, not yet confirmed, that the launch was scrubbed because the FAA denied the launch license at the last minute.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today will make an attempt to fly the ninth prototype of its Starship to a height of approximately 33,000 feet. As the company’s Starship website notes,
Similar to the high-altitude flight test of Starship serial number 8 (SN8), SN9 will be powered through ascent by three Raptor engines, each shutting down in sequence prior to the vehicle reaching apogee – approximately 10 km in altitude. SN9 will perform a propellant transition to the internal header tanks, which hold landing propellant, before reorienting itself for reentry and a controlled aerodynamic descent.
The Starship prototype will descend under active aerodynamic control, accomplished by independent movement of two forward and two aft flaps on the vehicle. All four flaps are actuated by an onboard flight computer to control Starship’s attitude during flight and enable precise landing at the intended location. SN9’s Raptor engines will then reignite as the vehicle attempts a landing flip maneuver immediately before touching down on the landing pad adjacent to the launch mount.
SpaceX will be providing a live stream, which I shall embed here at Behind the Black once it becomes available. In addition, there are these live streams available:
Without question the SpaceX live feed will provide the best visuals, but that will not go live until just before launch. Right now I think the Labpadre live feed is my preferred choice because it provides a quick checklist on the screen telling you the countdown status, which in turn gives you an idea how soon the launch might be. For example, when the sirens sound, it means they are approximately 10 minutes to launch.
Stay tuned. This flight, which will likely be as epic as the flight of prototype #8, could make today a fun day in the history of spaceflight.
They’re coming for you next: A New York city literary agent was fired by her agency for merely having accounts at both Parler and Gab, based on a single complaint on Twitter.
Colleen Oefelein, an associate literary agent with the New York City-based Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency, was sacked after her boss learned that she owned accounts on Gab and Parler. The agency’s owner, Jennifer DeChiara, publicly announced on Twitter that the firm had dropped Oefelein after making the “distressing” discovery.
“We do not condone this activity, and apologize to anyone who has been affected or offended by this,” the message read. DeChiara stressed that her agency was committed to ensuring a “voice of unity” and was firmly “on the side of social justice.”
Oefelein says she was really fired because she is a conservative and a Christian. And the evidence shows that her use of these two platforms had little to do with politics, as she was having trouble logging onto her Twitter account and was switching for that reason. Moreover, when she did post on any of these social media sites, she used them not for political reasons but to interact with her clients and other writers.
None of those facts mattered. One fascist thug on Twitter complained, slandering her by accusing her without evidence of frequenting “alt-right social media”, whatever that means, and the owner of the agency, Jennifer DeChiara, moved swiftly to fire her.
In other words, merely touching a social media platform that won’t participate in the blacklisting movement is now grounds for blacklisting.
It seems to me she has solid legal grounds to sue, and win big. Regardless, this action by the owner of this literary agency shows that the storm-troopers in today’s leftist dominant culture come from both the rank and file as well as their political leadership in the Democratic Party.
Be aware. Your liberal friends might not really be your friends. Instead, they may be people who enthusiastically endorse McCarthyism and the blacklisting of innocent Americans, merely because those Americans disagree with them.
The uncertainty of science: According to a new analysis of the data from Curiosity and Martian orbiters, scientists now propose that the climate in Gale Crater was never warm, but ranged from Icelandic conditions to far colder.
More importantly, the data suggests that none of chemistry there that required the presence of water was formed by fluvial processes, or flowing water. From the abstract:
We show that the geochemistry and mineralogy of most of the fine‐grained sedimentary rocks in Gale crater display first order similarities with sediments generated in climates that resemble those of present‐day Iceland, while other parts of the stratigraphy indicate even colder baseline climate conditions. None of the lithologies examined at Gale crater resemble fluvial sediments or weathering profiles from warm (temperate to tropical) terrestrial climates. [emphasis mine]
As must be repeated, the mineralogy found by Curiosity points to the presence of water once in Gale Crater, now gone. The initial assumption has always been that this water must have been liquid, as found on Earth. This new research is noting that the conditions show little evidence that liquid water ever existed, but was instead held in frozen lakes and glaciers.
In the coming years I think we are going to learn a lot about the glaciers and ice on Mars, both past and present, and how they reshaped Mars in ways that are alien to processes found on Earth.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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A evening pause: To my wife, Diane.
The uncertainty of science: A new analysis of the data used by scientists who claimed in September that they had detected phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus has concluded that it wasn’t phosphine at all but sulfur dioxide, a chemical compound long known to be prevalent there.
The UW-led team shows that sulfur dioxide, at levels plausible for Venus, can not only explain the observations but is also more consistent with what astronomers know of the planet’s atmosphere and its punishing chemical environment, which includes clouds of sulfuric acid. In addition, the researchers show that the initial signal originated not in the planet’s cloud layer, but far above it, in an upper layer of Venus’ atmosphere where phosphine molecules would be destroyed within seconds. This lends more support to the hypothesis that sulfur dioxide produced the signal.
When the first announcement was made, it was also noted as an aside that phosphine on Earth is only found in connection with life processes, thus suggesting wildly that it might signal the existence of life on Venus.
That claim was always unjustified, especially because we know so little about Venus’s atmosphere and its alien composition. Even if there was phosphine there, to assume it came from life is a leap well beyond reasonable scientific theorizing.
It now appears that the phosphine detection itself was questionable, which is not surprising since the detection was about 20 molecules out of a billion. And while this new analysis might be correct, but what it really does is illustrate how tentative our knowledge of Venus remains. It might be right, but it also could be wrong and the original results correct. There is simply too much uncertainty and gaps in our knowledge to come to any firm and confident conclusions.
None of that mattered with our modern press corps, which ran like mad to tout the discovery of life on Venus. As I wrote quite correctly in September in my original post about the first results,
The worst part of this is that we can expect our brainless media to run with these claims, without the slightest effort of incredulity.
We live in a world of make believe and made-up science. Data is no longer important, only the leaps of fantasy we can jump to based on the slimmest of facts. It was this desire to push theories rather than knowledge that locked humanity into a dark age for centuries during the Middle Ages. It is doing it again, now, and the proof is all around you, people like zombies and sheep, wearing masks based not on any proven science but on pure emotions.
Capitalism in space: Jeff Bezos today revealed that Blue Origin has successfully completed a full throttle long duration test of its BE-4 engine to be used by both its New Glenn Rocket and ULA’s Vulcan rocket.
“Perfect night,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who created the Blue Origin space venture more than two decades ago, wrote in an Instagram post. “Sitting in the back of my pickup truck under the moon and stars, watching another long-duration, full-thrust hot-fire test of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine.”
The post featured a shot of Bezos and other spectators looking on at the rising rocket plume from afar, as well as a video with closer perspectives of the firing.
The company has delivered two engines to ULA designed for ground testing, and says it will deliver soon the flight ready engines for Vulcan’s first launch later this year. Blue Origin also needs to get flight ready engines finished this year for New Glenn, which is also supposed to make it inaugural flight in ’21.
Personally, I think both Blue Origin and ULA are cutting it close. I will not be surprised if this tight schedule means that the first launches of both rockets get delayed into ’22.
Nonetheless, it is great news that the BE-4 appears to finally working as planned after what appeared to be problems for the past few years.
They’re coming for you next: Even as Democrats nationwide embrace blacklists of ordinary Americans for daring to express dissent from that party’s leftist agenda, the extremely leftwing school board in San Francisco is moving to blacklist as many of America’s historical national figures as possible, including Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Paul Revere.
Cancel culture is going after our Founding Fathers and other American leaders. Just this week, the San Francisco Board of Education voted to rename 44 public schools in a vote of 6 to 1.
The names on the chopping block are familiar and belong to important American leaders. Lincoln, Washington, and Roosevelt will no longer have their names attached to schools in the Golden Gate City. Dianne Feinstein’s name will also be removed.
Francis Scott Key, who penned the national anthem, former presidents William McKinley, James Garfield, James Monroe, and Herbert Hoover, and even Paul Revere were viewed as being too controversial and incendiary to have the honor of having a school named after them.
The school board can’t argue that these were supporters of slavery, since Lincoln freed the slaves, and Roosevelt, Key, McKinley, Hoover, and Revere never owned them and lived either in places that did not permit slavery (colonial New England) or outlawed it (post-Civil War America).
No, what this school board is doing is banning history, so that the students it “educates” will be guaranteed to know nothing about the past noble Americans who made this country a great and free land, for all. Instead, San Fransisco students will be indoctrinated into the Marxist philosophy of hate and envy, hating anyone who doesn’t agree with that ideology and having envy for anyone who works hard to achieve success instead of relying on the central government to feed them.
And most of all, they will be taught that America is, was, and always will be an evil land. They will be taught to hate it, so they can be enlisted in the war to destroy it.
So while today’s blacklisted Americans are dead and thus cannot be oppressed, the destruction of their names and good works is still possible, and the modern fascist Democratic Party is there to gladly oblige.
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image takes us to the Death Valley of Mars, Hellas Basin, a place I like to call the basement of Mars. The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) on September 28, 2020, and gives us another example of the very strange and inexplicable geological formations that are often found on the floor of Hellas.
The picture was taken not as part of any particular research project, but somewhat randomly for engineering reasons. In order to maintain the proper temperature of MRO’s high resolution camera, it must take images in a regular cadence. When large gaps in time occur between requested images, the camera team then picks locations to fill those gaps, sometimes randomly, sometimes based on a quick review of earlier wide angle images.
Sometimes these “terrain sample” images are quite uninteresting. More often they hold baffling surprises.
I think the photo to the right falls into the latter category. Though the terrain covered by the full image is largely flat and lacking in large features, the surface is strewn with perplexing small details.
The light streaks might be dust devil tracks, but why are they light here when such tracks are routinely dark everywhere else on Mars? What formed the many parallel small ridges? What caused the smooth solid patch near the photo’s center top? And why do the ridgelines at the western edge of that patch run in almost a perpendicular direction to the other ridges?
All a mystery, but then the floor of Hellas Basin is filled with such mysteries. Below is a list of some other cool images of the floor of Hellas, all weird and mystifying. Also below is an overview elevation map of Hellas Basin, with darker blue indicating the lowest elevations. The white cross marks the location of today’s photo.
» Read more
