Year: 2022

Pushback: Professor, fired for having an opinion, sues university

12:10 pm

Gregory Manco
Gregory Manco, a fighter for free speech

Don’t comply: Professor Gregory Manco, fired a professor at St. Joseph’s University because he publicly expressed some opinions, has now sued the university and six individuals (including one student whom Manco never even taught) for discrimination, breach of contract, negligence, defamation, slander, and civil conspiracy.

Manco’s story was covered twice previously in my daily blacklist column, first in March 2021 when he was suspended for having opinions the university did not like, and then in August 2021 when the university fired him for having those opinions.

Manco however is not bowing to this ill treatment. His complaint outlines in detail how the college and these individuals conspired to destroy him through false statements and slanders. He is demanding a full financial recovery for the loss of income plus compensatory and punitive damages for their actions.

Read his complaint, especially the section outlining the facts of the case. It is most revealing, especially at the level of viciousness and dishonest against Manco by these individuals, documented by screen captures of emails and texts. Worse, it appears the university in public endorsed their lies, despite that fact that its own investigation had exonerated Manco on all counts.

Based on the facts of the case, Manco is likely to win, and win big. The best part of his suit is that he is demanding damages from the actual individuals who defamed him, not just the university itself. People who nonchalantly slander others for the purpose of destroying them must be made to realize that this bad behavior will only result in their own destruction. Only then will these blacklisting tactics cease. Kudos to Manco for fighting back.

6 comments

SpaceX successfully launches 50 Starlink satellites

10:22 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully launched another 50 Starlink satellites using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage, on its fourth flight, landed successfully on the drone ship in the Pacific. The fairings completed their third flight. The satellites themselves have not yet been deployed, as of this moment. Deployment is expected in about an hour.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

8 SpaceX
2 China
2 Russia

SpaceX is so far maintaining a launch rate of one launch per week in ’22, as the company had predicted.

10 comments

Curiosity images the Martian version of a cave formation

10:00 am

An helictite on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken today by Curiosity’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a camera designed to get close high resolution images of very small features on the surface.

The Curiosity image site does not provide a scale, but MAHLI, located at the end of the rover’s robot arm, is capable of resolutions as small as 14 microns per pixel. Since a micron is one thousandth of a millimeter, and the original image was 1584 by 1184 pixels in size, that means the entire image is likely only slightly larger than 18 to 25 millimeters across, or slightly less than an inch.

This feature, which closely resembles a cave helictite, is thus about a quarter inch in size. Helictites, which in caves often resemble wildly growing roots, are nonetheless made of calcite, not organic material. They grow wildly because the water is being pushed out from their center is under pressure, so that as it drips away from the formation it leaves its calcite deposits randomly, causing the formation to grow randomly.

MAHLI also took what looks to be an infrared or heat image of the formation, which appears to show that the tips of the branches are at a different temperature, I think cooler, than the rest of the formation.

While seeping water causes helictites on Earth, what formed this thing on Mars is beyond my guess. It sure looks cool however.

4 comments

Space spat between Biden and Rogozin over Russian invasion of Ukraine

9:23 am

Yesterday saw harsh words expressed by both President Biden and the head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, concerning the partnership of the two countries at ISS, with Biden imposing sanctions and noting these will specifically harm Russia’s space industry, and Rogozin responding by threatening to dump ISS on either a U.S. or European city.

In Biden’s statement, he said, “We estimate that we will cut off more than half of Russia’s high-tech imports, and it will strike a blow to their ability to continue to modernize their military. It will degrade their aerospace industry, including their space program,”

Rogozin’s response came in a series of tweets on Twitter, with his most bellicose statements as follows:

Do you want to destroy our cooperation on the ISS?

This is how you already do it by limiting exchanges between our cosmonaut and astronaut training centers. Or do you want to manage the ISS yourself? Maybe President Biden is off topic, so explain to him that the correction of the station’s orbit, its avoidance of dangerous rendezvous with space garbage, with which your talented businessmen have polluted the near-Earth orbit, is produced exclusively by the engines of the Russian Progress MS cargo ships. If you block cooperation with us, who will save the ISS from an uncontrolled deorbit and fall into the United States or Europe? There is also the option of dropping a 500-ton structure to India and China. Do you want to threaten them with such a prospect? The ISS does not fly over Russia, so all the risks are yours. Are you ready for them?

Meanwhile, it isn’t Russia’s space industry that will suffer the most from this invasion, but Ukraine’s. For example, the American company Launcher, which has had a software team in the Ukraine, has moved most of that team to Bulgaria for their safety.

As a precaution given the escalating political situation, during the last few weeks, we successfully relocated our Ukraine staff to Sofia, Bulgaria, where we opened a new Launcher Europe office. We also invited their immediate family to join them in this move and funded their relocation expenses. We continue to encourage and support five of the support staff and one engineer who decided to remain in Ukraine.

The company’s press release makes it clear that it is no longer dependent in any way with facilities in the Ukraine.

Launcher’s actions will not be the last. Expect all Western commercial efforts linked to the Ukraine to break off ties in order to protect their investments. Moreover, if Russia should recapture the Ukraine entirely, it will likely not give much support to its space industry, as Roscosmos has developed its own Russian resources in the past two decades and will likely want to support those instead.

Thus, the expected destruction of that country’s aerospace industry by Russia’s invasion proceeds.

16 comments

Stratolaunch’s Roc successfully completes 4th test flight

9:02 am

Capitalism in space: Stratolaunch’s Roc airplane, the largest ever flown, successfully completed its 4th flight yesterday, testing for the first time the retraction and extension of its landing gear.

The flight lasted one hour and forty-three minutes.

The company is now aiming to begin full operations in the second half of ’23, when it hopes it will also be dropping versions of its Talon-A test vehicle from the bottom of Roc to perform hypersonic tests for the military as well as commercial companies.

2 comments

SLS launch delayed again

8:54 am

As expected, NASA announced yesterday that it will be unable to launch its SLS rocket on its first unmanned test flight in April, as the agency had hoped, and is now evaluating a May launch date instead.

“April is not a possibility. We’re still evaluating the tail end of May,” said Tom Whitmeyer, NASA’s deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development. “But I want to be really careful once again, being straightforward with you. You know, we really need to get through this next few weeks here, see how we’re doing.”

The next possible windows for launch are from May 7-21, June 6-16 and June 29-July 12.

March 16th is still being targeted for the rocket’s full launch countdown dress rehearsal. Since the agency has said it will need about a month to assess the results of that dress rehearsal, the May launch window is exceedingly unlikely. Based on the slow pace NASA has set throughout this entire project, I predict that the launch will not occur before June, with the excellent chance it will be delayed to the summer. And this is assuming the dress rehearsal goes perfectly.

6 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: 9-year-old boy denied kidney transplant because donor hasn’t gotten COVID jab

1:37 pm

The Bioethics group that wants to kill a little boy
The Cleveland Clinic’s Bioethics group that wants to kill a little boy.
Click to go to its website to contact them.

They’re coming for you next: A nine-year-old boy has been denied a kidney transplant by his hospital because his donor, who also happens to be his father, has not gotten any COVID shots.

Nine-year-old Tanner Donaldson suffers from stage 5 chronic kidney disease and urgently needs a kidney transplant. Miraculously, his father, Dane, is a perfect match to donate one of his kidneys. In early 2018, Cleveland Children’s Hospital approved the transplant. Shockingly, however, the hospital is now denying Tanner’s transplant following the execution of a “cruel, illogical, and unscientific” policy that demands the donor—but not Tanner—to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

Both the father and the child have gotten and recovered from the Wuhan flu, and thus have natural immunity, which is one reason the father doesn’t want to get the jab. Furthermore, he considers the risks of the shot far outweigh its benefits. As the family’s lawyer noted in a letter to Jane Jankowski, Interim Director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Bioethics that made the decision blocking the transplant operation:
» Read more

17 comments

The deadly impact of Russia’s Ukraine invasion on commercial space, on ISS, and beyond

11:50 am

The International Space Station
The Russian invasion might be signaling the end of the ISS partnership.

Though the international ramifications of the invasion of the Ukraine by Russia in the past week will be far reaching and hard to predict, we can get a hint by reviewing the impact on Russia’s long-standing partnership on ISS as well as the effect the invasion will have on a number of commercial enterprises dependent on both Russian and Ukrainian space rocketry.

The International Space Station

All signs so far from the western partners on ISS indicate that they are guardedly hopeful that the cooperation with Russia will continue unimpeded. According to two stories (here and here) describing a panel discussion today at George Washington University Space Policy Institute, state department officials expressed complete confidence that the partnership at ISS will continue without interruption, as it did in 2014 when Russia invaded the Crimea, taking it from the Ukraine. From the first link:
» Read more

100 comments

Ingenuity update: Dust storm caused issues; 20th flight upcoming

9:43 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

According to the Ingenuity engineering team in an update today, the Mars helicopter is getting ready for its 20th flight, scheduled for no earlier than today, even as the team successfully dealt with dust that settled on the helicopter’s various parts prior to flight 19.

The dust storm did, however, leave the Ingenuity team with two additional challenges to deal with: a dirty navigation camera window and dust in the swashplate assemblies.

Comparing navigation camera images taken before and after the dust storm revealed that the storm deposited debris on the ground-facing navigation camera window, specifically around the periphery of the camera’s field of view. Debris on the navigation camera window is problematic because Ingenuity’s visual navigation software may confuse the debris with the actual ground features that it tries to track during flight, which can cause navigation errors. Fortunately, Ingenuity’s software provides a tool for dealing with this issue: The team can provide an updated image mask file that tells the visual navigation software to ignore certain regions of the image. The operations team made use of this feature and performed an image mask update late last month.

The dust storm also deposited dust and sand in Ingenuity’s swashplate assemblies. On Mars as well as on Earth, a helicopter’s swashplates are very important because they control the pitch (angle from horizontal) of the rotor blades, which is essential for stable and controlled flight. Ingenuity’s swashplate issue was first detected when the rotorcraft reported a failure during its first automated swashplate actuator self-test since the dust storm on Jan. 28, 2022 (Sol 335 of the Perseverance mission). Data revealed that all six swashplate servo actuators were experiencing unusual levels of unusual levels of resistance while moving the swashplates over their range of motion.

The engineers subsequently tested a procedure, planned before launch, for cleaning the swashplates, and found that it worked.

The data from that activity showed a significant improvement – a reduction in servo loading, so the team followed it up with seven back-to-back servo wiggles on Sol 341. Remarkably, by the end of that activity, Ingenuity’s servo loads appeared nearly identical to nominal loads seen prior to the dust storm.

After dealing with both dust issues, flight 19 proceeded successfully, as planned.

The overview map above shows the present location of Perseverance as the red dot, the present location of Ingenuity by the green dot, and the approximate landing site for the helicopter’s 20th flight by the black dot. The tan dotted line shows Perseverance’s planned route.

Perseverance itself has been traveling fast since Ingenuity’s last flight on February 9th, almost completely retracing its steps to return almost to its landing site.

4 comments
1 … 164 165 166 167 168 … 192