Allison Young – Where Is My Mind?
An evening pause: Another Postmodern Jukebox performance.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
Year: 2021
Glen de Vries, fellow suborbital passenger with Shatner, dies in plane crash
Glen de Vries, one of the passengers that flew last month on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft with William Shatner, has died in a plane crash yesterday in New Jersey.
The New Jersey State Police named the two victims of the single-engine plane crash who died in Hampton Township’s Kemah Lake section of Sussex County on Thursday afternoon.
Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong and Glen M. de Vries, 49 of New York, New York, died in the crash, Trooper Brandi Slota, a spokesperson from the State Police, said early Friday.
Apparently Fischer was a flight instructor at Essex County Airport, where de Vries learned to fly.
SpaceX completes Starship static fire test with all six engines
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully completed a short static fire test of Starship prototype #20 using all six orbital engines.
Though this prototype has previously completed static fire tests, those used only two engines. This test was the first using all the engines that will fly on the spacecraft’s first orbital flight.
When that flight will occur remains uncertain. Elon Musk has said it could fly as early as this month. First however the FAA must give final approval of its environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica spaceport. The agency has released a preliminary draft approval, but that is not yet finalized, with no clear date on when an approval will be issued.
Snow on Martian dunes
Click for full image.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The first photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on September 19, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what appears to be snow nestled in the hollows of many dunes.
The second photo, cropped to post here, shows in high resolution the area in the white box.
Is that snow water, or dry ice? The location is very far north, 76 degrees latitude, so it could be either. Since the photo was requested by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, I emailed her to ask. Her answer:
Early in the spring all the bright stuff is dry ice. As it gets later in the spring it is probably still mostly dry ice but with HiRISE images alone we cannot really distinguish the composition of the ice. In-between the dunes it is almost certainly bare ground late in the spring, but since the dunes are dark the surface just looks bright in contrast
This picture was taken in summer, which suggests the snow is probably water, not dry ice. Yet, all the snow is found in the north-facing hollows, places that will remain mostly in shadow at this high latitude, 76 degrees north. Thus, it is possible that the snow is the last remaining traces of the thin dry ice mantle that covers the Martian poles down to about 60 degrees latitude during the winter, and sublimates away in summer.
Hansen had requested a whole bunch of similar images of such snowy dunes. As she explained,
» Read more
Today’s blacklisted Americans: Parents threatened with doxxing by school board for criticizing the board’s mask policies
That’s apparently what the Scottsdale school board thinks.
They’re coming for you next: Parents who have publicly objected to the mask mandate policies of a Scottsdale, Arizona school board have discovered that at least two members of the school board, Jann-Michael Greenburg and Zachary Lindsay, had compiled or had access to a Google drive folder containing personal information of the parents, including social security numbers, financial information, pictures of themselves and their children.
The information as complied clearly suggested the board members were going to use it to harass and harm the parents.
Parents have since dubbed the Google Drive an “online dossier.” The folders housed within the dossier are labeled “SUSD Wackos,” “Press Conference Psychos,” and “Anti Mask Lunatics,” among others. Included under “Press Conference Psychos” was a video that shows parents calmly holding signs that read “CRT is Racist” and “SUSD We Demand Transparency.”
The dossier takes specific aim at the concerned parent group “Community Advocacy Network” (CAN). Administrators and founders of CAN’s active Facebook page have folders dedicated to screenshots of their Facebook comments, pictures of them with their husbands, and in some cases financial records.
Much of the information was apparently gathered by Greenburg’s father, who is documented to have videotaped the parents repeatedly, sometimes hiding his identity. He also has a track record of harassment.
» Read more
South Korean lawmaker proposes his country build a reusable rocket
The new colonial movement: Following a meeting with high space officials, a South Korean lawmaker announced yesterday that his country is now planning the design and construction of a reusable rocket.
“Starting next year, the development of a high-performance reusable rocket with liquid-fueled 100-ton thrust engines will begin,” said Rep. Cho Seung-rae of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, who represents the committee. “Having such a liquid-fueled high-performance rocket engine is necessary [for South Korea] to successfully fulfill the missions of launching a [robotic] lunar lander by 2030 and building the Korea Positioning System by 2035 on its own.”
Cho said the envisioned engine will be “capable of controlling its thrust with four consecutive reburns,” a function which he said would “significantly slash launch cost.” The lawmaker said the government will carry out two-year preliminary research on the issue, with the budget of 12 billion won ($10.2 million) in hand.
South Korea has yet to successfully launch its own homebuilt Nuri rocket, with the first test flight failing less than a month ago.
In addition, this announcement was a surprise, as the budget request for ’22, made in September, had not included it. It appears that this lawmaker and those high space officials teamed up to propose it. We shall see if it gets into the final budget.
Corporal Matthew Creek – The Last Post
An evening pause: Played at the Australian War Memorial, Canberra. From the youtube page:
In military tradition, the Last Post is the bugle call that signifies the end of the day’s activities. It is also sounded at military funerals to indicate that the soldier has gone to his final rest and at commemorative services
In honor of this Armistice Day, the eleventh day of the eleventh month, and those who gave their lives for freedom, something that appears at this moment sadly lost in Australia.
History Unplugged – The Age of Discovery 2.0: Episode 4
Episode four of the six part series, The Age of Discovery 2.0, from the podcast, History Unplugged, is now available here.
This is the episode where Scott Rank interviewed me about my new book, Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. From his show summary:
Today’s guest is Robert Zimmerman, author of “Conscious Choice,” which describes the history of the first century of British settlement in North America. That was when those settlers were building their own new colonies and had to decide whether to include slaves from Africa.
In New England, slavery was vigorously rejected. The Puritans wanted nothing to do with this institution, desiring instead to form a society of free religious families, a society that became the foundation of the United States of American, dedicated to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
In Virginia however, slavery was gladly embraced, resulting in a corrupt social order built on power, rule, and oppression.
Why the New England citizens were able to reject slavery, and Virginians were not, is the story with direct implications for all human societies, whether they are here on Earth or on the far-flung planets across the universe.
I think what I say nicely complements what Glenn Reynolds and Robert Zubrin said in the previous episodes.
Scientists: Asteroid in an orbit entwined with the Earth might be Moon rock
Data obtained by scientists using ground-based telescopes now suggests that the small asteroid Kamo`oalewa, which has an orbit that makes it a quasi-Moon of the Earth, might have originally come from the Moon.
From their paper’s abstract:
We find that (469219) Kamoʻoalewa rotates with a period of 28.3 (+1.8/−1.3) minutes and displays a reddened reflectance spectrum from 0.4–2.2 microns. This spectrum is indicative of a silicate-based composition, but with reddening beyond what is typically seen amongst asteroids in the inner solar system. We compare the spectrum to those of several material analogs and conclude that the best match is with lunar-like silicates. This interpretation implies extensive space weathering and raises the prospect that Kamo’oalewa could comprise lunar material.
Kam’oalewa — which is only about 150 feet across — is one of five such quasi-Earth-moons. All orbit the Sun in orbits that are similar to the Earth’s and are such that the asteroids periodically loop around our planet each year.
This data will be useful to the Chinese, who are planning a mission to Kamo-oalewa in ’24 to grab samples.
Today’s blacklisted American: Professor forced to undergo mental examination because students didn’t like exam question
Mao’s 1966 cultural revolution comes to the
University of Illinois-Chicago
Persecution is now cool! Law professor Jason Kilborn at the University of Illinois-Chicago was suspended by his university and forced to undergo a mental examination plus drug tests essentially because some unnamed students objected to an exam question that referenced racial slurs and that Kilborn had been using in his tests for a decade.
Kilborn told Campus Reform that his classes “were cancelled for the entire semester on the very first day of class. He said he also had to undergo “an agonizing several-week period of ‘administrative leave,’” during which he was “barred from campus and prevented from participating in normal faculty communications and activities, including my elected position on the university promotion and tenure committee.”
Kilborn said he was compelled to submit to three hours of mental examination and a drug test by university doctors and a social worker, broken into two segments spanning the course of a week.
The exam question that caused the furor appears to have been part of a program focused on teaching law students how to determine the factual basis for any legal action, as Kilborn explains here,
» Read more
The stormy atmosphere of Jupiter
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was created by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulo from a Juno image taken during its 16th close pass of Jupiter in 2018. To bring out the different colors of the clouds he enhanced the resolution and color contrast.
We have no scale, but I would guess the distances seen exceed several thousand miles. The area covered is what is called Jupiter’s South South Temperate Belt, the visible belt at about 40 degrees south latitude that circles the South Polar Region (which is the darker purple swirls in the bottom left). This belt is difficult to observe from Earth because of its high latitude, with the curve of Jupiter’s limb beginning to bend away from view.
ISS to maneuver around space junk leftover from Chinese anti-satellite test
Russian engineers will today fire engines on a Progress freighter docked to ISS to guarantee that a piece of debris left over from a 2007 Chinese military anti-satellite test does not hit the station.
The object the space station will dodge is called 35114 in NASA’s catalog of space objects, and is also identified at 1999-025DKS, a piece of debris from a Chinese anti-satellite weapons test in 2007. Originally part of a Chinese weather satellite, the debris resulted from an in-orbit missile test performed by China. As part of that test, a kinetic-energy, suborbital missile was fired at a defunct Chinese weather satellite called Fengyun-1C (which stopped working in 2002), obliterating it into thousands of pieces.
The destroyed satellite was originally in a much higher orbit, but atmospheric drag has pulled the debris closer to Earth over the years and ultimately into the flight path of the space station. The two objects’ closest approach is estimated to occur on Nov. 12, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at Harvard who tracks and catalogs objects in space. McDowell tweeted on Tuesday that his calculations show that this will be the 29th space station debris avoidance maneuver, and the third related to the 2007 Chinese anti-satellite test.
The maneuver will take place prior to the arrival of Endurance, carrying four astronauts.
While the anti-sat test initially produced about 3,500 pieces of debris, that number has dropped in the past fourteen years to about 2,700 pieces as the orbits of these objects slowly decay. The test was also another example of China’s willingness to break the Outer Space Treaty. As a signatory China is required to control every object it puts into orbit in order to prevent collisions. Instead, it performed a military test that created debris in the thousands, in orbits that threaten ISS.
We shall get another demonstration of China’s contempt for treaties in the next few months, when it launches two more large modules to its space station and the large core stage of the rocket comes crashing down somewhere on Earth, out of control.