An evening pause: We’ve had two bee swarms at my house in Tucson in the past decade. With the first we made the terrible mistake of taking the advice of an exterminator who destroyed it. The second time we knew better and simply waited 24 hours for them to move on.
The bee remover here removes them, but wisely without harming them. And he does it in a manner that will both surprise you and make you cringe.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
Neptune One at launch. Click for full image.
Capitalism in space: Space Perspectives announced today that it has successfully completed the first unmanned test flight of its manned balloon, Neptune One, in preparation for commercial tourist flights.
From the press release:
The vehicle flew to its target altitude and traversed the Florida peninsula before splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico and being recovered. The historic 6 hour and 39 minute flight marks the first major step towards flying customers to space for an unrivaled experience and perspective of our world from space.
Neptune One launched at 5:23 am EDT from the Space Coast Air and Spaceport and reached its planned altitude of 108,409 feet before executing a splashdown at the predetermined location 50 miles off the west coast of Florida.
Today’s announcement made no mention of when those commercial flights would begin, though previously the company had said it was aiming for commercial flights in ’24, and they appear to be meeting the schedule then announced.
Click for full image.
One of the four strap-on boosters used to launch three astronauts to China’s new space station on June 16th ended up landing on a public road in China.
The photo to the right, uploaded at this twitter feed, shows the booster. The parachute cords at its top explain why it is so relatively undamaged. The Chinese are apparently experimenting with parachutes to slow and maybe even control its descent. They might even be planning to catch the stage before it hits the ground, using a plane or helicopter, as both ULA and Rocket Lab hope to do with their Vulcan and Electron rockets.
Of course, we do not know this, as the Chinese tell us nothing.
Note that the hypergolic fuels, such as the hydrazine used in this booster, are extremely toxic. The person who took this picture is in very great danger, even if he or she does not know it.
Potential routes of hydrazine exposure include dermal, ocular, inhalation and ingestion.
Hydrazine exposure can cause skin irritation/contact dermatitis and burning, irritation to the eyes/nose/throat, nausea/vomiting, shortness of breath, pulmonary edema, headache, dizziness, central nervous system depression, lethargy, temporary blindness, seizures and coma. Exposure can also cause organ damage to the liver, kidneys and central nervous system. Hydrazine is documented as a strong skin sensitizer with potential for cross-sensitization to hydrazine derivatives following initial exposure.
Not that the Chinese government really cares. They have been dumping these boosters on their own people for decades, and only recently have apparently begun to look into ways of controlling their descent.
Ethnic round-ups: Coming to your town in America soon!
Persecution is now cool! An international food festival in Philadelphia decided to ban an Israeli food truck, Moshava Philadephia, in response of the many threats of physical violence it received if the Jewish vendor was allowed to attend.
The backlash to this bigoted decision was so immediate that the organizations putting together the food festival, called “Eat up the Borders” and “Sunflower Philly”, decided to cancel the entire event rather than back down and allow a Jew to sell food there.
The statement by Eat Up the Borders announcing the decision to ban the Jewish vendor is particularly vile in its intellectual dishonesty:
» Read more
Capitalism in space: According to a new report [pdf] issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on June 8th, on-going technical issues with Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine threaten ULA’s planned inaugural launch of its new Vulcan rocket later this year.
From page 106 of the report:
A U.S. produced rocket engine [BE-4] under development [by Blue Origin] for ULA’s Vulcan launch vehicle is experiencing technical challenges related to the igniter and booster capabilities required and may not be qualified in time to support first launches beginning in 2021. A joint program office and ULA team is tracking these challenges, and NSSL officials told us Vulcan remains on track to support first launches and certification in 2021. However, if ULA cannot complete engine qualification before the 2021 flight certification, the program might continue to rely on ULA’s Atlas V—which uses engines manufactured in the Russian Federation—to support ULA’s 2022 launches, despite a nearly $2.9 billion investment in new launch system development. [emphasis mine]
ULA has a limited number of Russian engines in its inventory. At some point it must move on to American-built engines, and if Blue Origin’s BE-4 cannot be fixed then the company will be forced to look for other options.
Both ULA and Blue Origin maintain that the first Vulcan launch will occur in the fourth quarter of this year, launching Astrobotic’s lunar lander Peregrine to the Moon, but no date has been announced. If this GAO report is describing problems that still remain as of June 2021 and have not been fixed, then expect a further delay to be announced, probably by September.
These technical issues with the BE-4 engine also impact Blue Origin’s plans to begin launching its orbital rocket, New Glenn, next year. That rocket is already two years behind schedule, delays caused partly by these engine issues and partly due to the requirements imposed by the military under the above-mentioned $2.9 billion program to develop new launch systems. Without that new engine, Blue Origin’s much-touted effort to compete with SpaceX for commercial launches will go up in smoke.
Astronauts yesterday successfully completed the installation of the first set of new solar panels on ISS, completing the work they could not do on a first spacewalk because of issues with one of the astronaut’s spacesuits.
The new panels are deployed on top of the old panels. Though smaller, they are more efficient, so they actually produce more energy total.
The IROSAs [acronym for the new panels] will be installed on top of six of the station’s existing solar arrays, which will allow the IROSAs to utilize the same sun-tracking motors and be connected into the same electrical system as the current arrays.
With the IROSAs being around 30% efficient, compared to the 14% efficiency of the original arrays, the IROSAs will generate roughly the same amount of power as the originals despite being only half their size. Each IROSA will produce 20kW of additional power, for a total of 120kW across all six arrays.
However, because the IROSAs are smaller, they will not completely cover the half of the six [old panels] they’ll be installed over. Instead, portions of the original arrays will still be power positive. The unshadowed portions of the original arrays will continue to produce 95kW as a result, making for a combined total of 215kW of power available to the ISS — an increase of nearly a third compared with the outpost’s current levels.
The set installed yesterday was the first of six new panels to be installed, replacing all of the old panels.
An attempt to switch the Hubble Space Telescope to a different backup computer module in order to bypass a broken unit failed last week, leaving the telescope in safe mode.
A payload computer on Hubble stopped working June 13, the agency said in a June 16 statement. Engineers speculated that the computer, used to manage operations of Hubble’s science instruments, malfunctioned because of a degrading memory module, putting the instruments into a safe mode.
The agency said at the time that it would switch of a backup memory module that day and, after about a day of testing, restart the instruments and resume science observations.
However, in a June 18 statement, NASA said those efforts to switch to a backup memory module failed because “the command to initiate the backup module failed to complete.” An attempt to restore the computer with both the original memory module and the backup unit also failed.
While the engineers at the Space Telescope Science Institute, that operates Hubble, have expressed confidence they can overcome these issues, the failures this week are truly troublesome. We may truly be facing the end of the telescope,
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
» Read more
An evening pause: The future, or maybe sadly, already the present.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on March 4, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what MRO’s science team labeled a “Landform in Source Region of Harmakhis Vallis.”
They are being very correct and careful with that label. The landform here is quite clearly reminiscent of a glacier, but because they don’t yet have confirmation of its watery nature, as good scientists they can’t call it that.
I however am a mere journalist, so I am free to speculate more wildly. Sure looks like glaciers to me, the ice flowing downhill from the left to the right and flowing around that central mound.
The overview map below gives a wider context, but also makes the behavior of the glaciers here far more puzzling.
» Read more
The Civil Rights Act of 1964:
Doesn’t exist at George Mason University.
The new bigotry on American campuses: In an email sent out to his entire faculty in mid-May, George Mason University president Gregory Washington demanded that the university’s hiring practices specifically discriminate in favor of minorities and women over whites and men.
Washington further argued that the faculty at GMU do not proportionally represent the ethnicities of the student body or the surrounding region. A vision of diversity and inclusion in hiring “is a recognition of the reality that our society’s future lies in multicultural inclusion,” he said in his email.
This begins by redefining “best” to include “lived experiences” as a top hiring criteria alongside professional aptitude, he stated. In short, “We either believe that diversity and inclusion can improve our performance, or we don’t,” Washington stated.
Consequently, Washington recommended hiring based jointly on teaching ability, research achievements, and openness to diversity. The result, he argued, will support minorities who don’t have equal access to opportunities for success.
To really get a flavor of Washington’s discriminatory recommendations you need to read his whole email. » Read more
In a press conference yesterday the Japanese space agency JAXA announced that scientists have completed their inventory of the samples brought back from the asteroid Ryugu by the Hayabusa-2 spacecraft, and are now ready to begin distributing those samples to scientists around the world for more detailed research.
JAXA has cataloged the soil samples brought back by Hayabusa 2 last December, by size, color and shape. From now, 269 researchers from 14 countries, including Japan and the United States, will conduct an in-depth analysis of the soil’s structures and components over the course of about a year.
As expected, the inventory found the samples had a large amount of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms. Even before Hayabusa-2’s arrival, Ryugu had been catalogued as a “hydrated” asteroid, which means it was thought to contain a lot of hydrogen and oxygen, the basic elements of water. The inventory has now confirmed this.
