A evening pause: This silliness is perfect as we head into the New Year’s eve weekend.
Note: He was anticipating a Michigan victory in the Rose Bowl, which wouldn’t happen until the next day. Unfortunately, Michigan lost.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
An afterthought at Southern Utah University
Bring a gun to a knife fight: After receiving a threat of legal action [pdf] for violating the first amendment rights of its students, South Utah University (SUU) eliminated a “bias reporting” option on its website that allowed any student to anonymously squelch dissent, simply because he or she did not like what the other person said.
Southern Utah University (SUU) removed a tab from its campus safety website where students and officials could report alleged “bias” or “hate” incidents after the Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF), a non-profit legal group, challenged that it violates students’ rights to free speech, SLF confirmed to the Daily Caller News Foundation.
» Read more
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 12. 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Dubbed simply as a a “terrain sample” by the science team, the picture was not taken as part of any specific research project, but instead to fill a gap in the orbiter’s shooting schedule so as to maintain the camera’s proper temperature. When MRO’s science team does this, they try to pick something in the area below that might be interesting. Sometimes they succeed, but often the features in the picture are nondescript.
The white line delineates the rim of a faint and very eroded small crater. Are the depressions that are mostly concentrated just to its south and east sinks or past impact craters? I haven’t the faintest idea. The overview map below helps to answer this question, but only partly.
» Read more
Click for full resolution image.
UPDATE: A tweet from China shows that the strap-on boosters of this rocket crashed near homes in China, though no one was hurt.
Original post:
—————–
The Philippine government issued a statement yesterday warning the public about possible debris from the December 29th launch by China of its Long March 3B rocket.
The Philippine Space Agency (PhilSA) is recommending precautionary measures related to expected unburned debris from the Long March 3B rocket scheduled for launch today between 12:33 PM and 01:10 PM Philippine time from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Xichang, Sichuan Province, China. Upon confirmation of planned launch dates, PhilSA immediately issued an advisory to all relevant government agencies on the estimated drop zone area and proposed the issuance of appropriate warnings on air and marine access.
Based on the Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) issued by the Civil Aviation Administration of China (CAAC) to the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP), expected unburned debris, such as the rocket boosters and payload fairing, is projected to fall within a drop zone area located within the vicinity of Recto bank, approximately 137 kilometers from Ayungin Shoal and 200 kilometers from Quezon, Palawan. The unburned debris is designed to be discarded as the rocket enters outer space. While not projected to fall on land features or inhabited areas within the Philippine territory, falling debris poses danger and potential risk to ships, aircraft, fishing boats, and other vessels that will pass through the drop zone.
Though the drop zone avoided inhabited areas, it included regions where fisherman worked, and the flight path still flew over inhabited areas. The risk was extremely low, but it appears China also made no effort prior to launch to coordinate this situation with other governments, such as the Philippines. Its warning apparently arrived just before launch. Thus, there was risk that Filipino fisherman were in the drop zone at launch.
South Korea has successfully completed the second test flight of a solid-fueled missile.
The test came after North Korea claimed earlier this month to have staged a test of a “high-thrust, solid-fuel” rocket motor to develop a “new-type” strategic weapon system.
…In March, the state-run Agency for Defense Development carried out the first test of an indigenous solid-fuel space rocket at a testing site in Taean, 150 kilometers southwest of Seoul, to confirm its capabilities.
The rocket is designed to put a small satellite into a low Earth orbit for surveillance operations. Compared with liquid-fuel space vehicles, solid-fuel ones are known to be usually simpler and more cost-effective to launch.
South Korea might claim this rocket is intended for launching smallsats, but its main purpose almost certainly is as a military missile to counter the missile program of North Korea that has accelerated since Joe Biden became president.
SpaceX today successfully launched an Israeli Earth-observation satellite, using its Falcon 9 rocket.
The first stage successfully completed its eleventh flight, touching down softly at SpaceX’s facility at Vandenberg Space Force Base.
This launch completes SpaceX’s 2022 launch year, with a record 61 launches, one more than predicted by the company earlier in the year, and the most ever by a privately owned company.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
62 China
61 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA
The U.S. now leads China 85 to 62, while trailing the rest of the entire world combined 94 to 85. The 85 launches for the U.S. is a new record for a single year, smashing the record of 70 launches set in 1966.
On Monday I will publish my annual full roundup of the state of global launch industry, based on the 2022 numbers.
An evening pause: The studio this was recorded in was once a church, and that apparently gave Hart some extra inspiration.
Hat tip John Jossy.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Soon thereafter, SpaceX applied for an additional eighteen. All 23 will be in the U.S., thus significantly enhancing access to its Starlink constellation for American customers. It also appears the company is building at least one gateway in the United Kingdom.
The first Wallops launch was delayed until January due to red tape. The company now plans back-to-back Wallops launches. It also plans to continue a launch pace of one launch per month for 2023.
Doesn’t exist any longer in Michigan
Bring a gun to a knife fight: A century-old Catholic parish based in Grand Rapids, the Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish, is suing Michigan preemptively, anticipating that the state will soon require it to hire queers as well as teach the queer agenda in its school, based on the state’s very broad Civil Rights Act that forbids any discrimination based on sex.
The Michigan Supreme Court recently reinterpreted the prohibition on sex discrimination in Michigan’s Civil Rights Act and penal code to include sexual orientation and gender identity. That change requires Sacred Heart of Jesus Parish and its school, Sacred Heart Academy, to hire faculty and staff who lead lives in direct opposition to the Catholic faith, speak messages that violate Church doctrine, and refrain from articulating Catholic beliefs in teaching its students and when advertising the school to prospective students or job applicants.
Additionally, by preventing Sacred Heart from operating its school consistent with its beliefs, state officials are violating the rights of parents—including the three families who have joined the lawsuit—who specifically chose to send their children to Sacred Heart Academy because the school aligns with their values and religious beliefs.
You can read the lawsuit here [pdf]. It notes in detail the hostility to the Catholic Church by the Attorney General of Michigan, Democrat Dana Nessel, who appears eager to use the law to deny all Catholics their first amendment rights.
» Read more
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on October 28, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as a “layered feature” inside a small 4,500-foot-wide crater.
Located at 36 degrees north latitude, we are likely looking at glacial ice layers inside this crater, with each layer probably marking a different Martian climate cycle. The terraces suggest that during each growth cycle the glaciers grew less, meaning that less snow fell with each subsequent cycle. This in turn suggests a total loss of global water over time on Mars.
The overview map below gives us the wider context.
» Read more
China has announced its plan to build ground-based multi-segmented optical telescope, similar in design to the 10-meter Keck Telescope in Hawaii.
Peking University wants to build the largest optical telescope in Asia and close the gap in astronomy capabilities with the rest of the world.
The project aims to create an initial telescope with an aperture of 19.7 feet (6 meters) by 2024; the mirror will be expanded to 26.2 feet (8 m) by 2030. The project, which in English is called the Expanding Aperture Segmented Telescope (EAST), is being led by Peking University.
Like Keck, the primary mirror would be made of smaller segments, fitted together to create the larger mirror. While not as large as Keck, EAST would be among the largest in the world.
That’s nice of them: The Royal Astronomical Society in Britain last week announced that it has ended its blacklisting of James Webb, the man who headed NASA during the 1960s space race, by once again permitting writers of science papers for its Monthly Notices journal to use the full name of the James Webb Space Telescope.
The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) previously criticized NASA for not immediately addressing concerns that Webb persecuted queer employees; the NASA-led James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) that launched in December 2021 is named after him. But with new information to hand suggesting Webb played no direct role in these issues, Webb’s name can now reappear in scientific papers, the RAS stated Dec. 22.
“The RAS will now allow authors submitting scientific papers to its journals to use either ‘James Webb Space Telescope’ or the acronym ‘JWST’ to refer to the observatory,” RAS officials wrote. The major journals of the RAS include the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), one of the top astronomical journals worldwide.
The society backed off from its position after NASA published a long detailed report documenting the utter falsehood of the claim. Too bad this so-called science organization didn’t consider the evidence itself before issuing its blacklist order. One would think scientists above all would consider evidence, not undocumented slanders, as essential before condemning a person.
