Beki Hemingway & Robin James Hurt – Keep Your Distance
An evening pause: Hat tip Dan Morris.
Year: 2022
Random Martian ridges on a lava plain
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on December 30, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This was a terrain sample image, taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule and thus keep its temperature maintained properly. When the MRO team needs to take such pictures, they try to pick locations that might be interesting and previously unphotographed, but often the location is neither.
In this case this terrain sample captured a flat lava plain interspersed with sinuous ridges going in all directions. On top of this is a scattering of smaller impact craters, which obviously occurred after the lava had flowed and solidified.
What caused the ridges?
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Pushback: Conservative Hispanic student defeats effort to blacklist her
Gallegos is also participating in Wichita State’s
first Collegiate Leadership Competition
Don’t comply: Despite being Hispanic, Olivia Gallegos — a student at Wichita State University and an elected member of its student government — was accused of being a white supremacist and threatened with removal because she nominated a conservative woman for recognition by the school’s Diversity, Empowerment and Inclusion Committee.
It seems that committee wanted nothing to do with diversity of thought, even if it empowered a woman.
“Basically by highlighting a conservative, I was [called] a white supremacist and [accused of] giving a platform to white supremacy,” she said. “I just laughed, because I’m Hispanic.”
But the effort to force Gallegos to resign never came to fruition. “I had to sit through a 2.5-hour senate review board where they ultimately determined, ‘You did nothing wrong. But we’d like you to meet with diversity and inclusion to learn how to respond to things like this, and use this as a learning experience,’” Gallegos said.
She refused.
Space tug company picks Falcon 9 for test flights
Capitalism in space: Launcher, one of several space tug startups, has awarded SpaceX the contract to launch its first four test flights of its Orbiter tug.
Launcher announced Feb. 7 it signed a multi-launch contract with SpaceX for three additional missions of its Orbiter tug. Those tugs will fly on Falcon 9 rideshare missions in January, April and October of 2023.
Launcher’s first Orbiter tug will launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-6 rideshare mission in October 2022 under a contract announced last June when the company revealed its plans to develop Orbiter. The vehicle is designed to deploy cubesats and other smallsats in their desired orbits as well as host payloads for missions lasting up to two years.
Launcher — along with Momentus, Spaceflight, Astroscale, and several others — are all rushing to build and launch the first tugs for transporting satellites from orbit to orbit, or to remove space junk. Launcher’s deal with SpaceX suggests it is tailoring its system for satellites launched from the Falcon 9.
Rogozin’s salary rockets upward
The salary of Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Roscosmos which runs Russia’s entire space industry, has grown from a mere $100K when he took over in 2018 to $1.3 million in 2020.
During the most recent year for which salary data is available, 2020, Rogozin was paid $1.3 million—and this does not include perks of the job, such as four vehicles, real estate holdings, spousal pay, and possibly off-the-books income. Before his imprisonment, Russian critic Alexei Navalny released an investigation of Rogozin and the corruption at Roscosmos that delves into some of these benefits.
Rogozin has seen a stunning rise in his fortunes since coming to Roscosmos. Before his move, he earned about $100,000 per year as deputy chairman in the Russian government. In 2018, his salary jumped to $513,000, and in 2019, it went up to $639,000.
By way of comparison, NASA, which has a budget several times larger than that of Roscosmos, pays Administrator Bill Nelson an annual salary of $185,100.
Rogozin is merely doing what all high level managers in Russia do. They get a job, and while there suck as much cash from it as they can before moving on or getting fired. The gigantic and fast increase in these numbers suggest Rogozin does not expect to remain in charge that much longer.
This pattern is very similar to what happened in the Roman Empire. The Caesar in Rome would appoint governors to the various outlying provinces in Germany, France, England, and the Middle East, who would then skim off for themselves as much cash from tax revenues as they could get away with, then retire back to Rome to live the good life. Meanwhile, governance in those provinces would suffer, to the point that eventually the empire fell.
Rogozin appears to be doing the same in Roscosmos, which suggests not much will come from its many projects to come up with new rockets, spacecraft, and space stations in the coming years.
Lockheed Martin wins NASA contract to build Mars rocket
Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded Lockheed Martin a $194 million contract to build the Mars rocket that will lift Perseverance’s samples into orbit for return to Earth.
Set to become the first rocket fired off another planet, the MAV [Mars Ascent Vehicle] is a crucial part of a campaign to retrieve samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover and deliver them to Earth for advanced study. NASA’s Sample Retrieval Lander, another important part of the campaign, would carry the MAV to Mars’ surface, landing near or in Jezero Crater to gather the samples cached by Perseverance. The samples would be returned to the lander, which would serve as the launch platform for the MAV. With the sample container secured, the MAV would then launch.
Once it reaches Mars orbit, the container would be captured by an ESA (European Space Agency) Earth Return Orbiter spacecraft outfitted with NASA’s Capture, Containment, and Return System payload. The spacecraft would bring the samples to Earth safely and securely in the early- to mid-2030s.
According to this project’s webpage, the European Space Agency (ESA) is building that they call a “fetch rover” which will be deployed from the rover to get the samples and bring them back to the MAV.
There are a lot of uncertainties in this scenario. It has been decades since Lockheed Martin built rockets. ESA has not yet built an operational Mars rover. It is also unclear who will build NASA’s lander and capture/return payload. Thus, do not expect this mission to launch “as early as ’26,” as the press release says. I predict it will launch at least five, maybe ever ten years, later.
Bob & Ray, Jane, Laraine & Gilda – Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?
An evening pause: Bob & Ray, performing live in 1979 with the three very talented ladies from the original Saturday Night Live crew.
Hat tip Charlie Tutino.
Astra launch aborts at T-0
UPDATE: The launch has been scrubbed for the day. No word on when they will reschedule, nor has Astra released any information as to what caused the launch abort, other than a “telemetry issue.”.
Capitalism in space: The second attempt by Astra to launch its first commercial satellites on its second orbital launch from Cape Canaveral aborted at T-0.
The launch on February 5th was scrubbed when some radar equipment used by the range failed.
The launch team is presently reviewing the data to see if they can recycle and attempt another launch today. This would be the second recycle today, as the first launch attempt was held about a minute before launch and then recycled, leading to the launch abort at T-0. The launch window still has about 100 minutes left.
The rocket is carrying four cubesats, three built by students at three different universities, with the fourth built by engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in their effort to learn how to build cubesats for themselves.
I have embedded Astra’s live stream below the fold, for those who wish to watch.
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Pushback: Huge increase in homeschooling in VA
Home-schooling: a example of liberty in action
Because of oppressive and racist policies that include mask mandates, remote schooling, and the teaching of the bigoted and Marxist program dubbed Critical Race Theory, Virginia has seen a huge increase in home schooling in the past two years.
Homeschooling in Virginia has increased by nearly 40% since 2019, which has been partly fueled by the implementation of critical race theory in classrooms and the coronavirus. “The children don’t belong to the state. I think parents really want to impart their own values to their children – their values and beliefs and their own worldview. And that is a major reason parents are home schooling,” Yvonne Bunn, director of government affairs for the Home Educators Association of Virginia, told the Virginia Mercury earlier this month.
There are currently about 62,000 homeschoolers in Virginia, according to Virginia Department of Education data. There were 44,226 homeschoolers in the state during the 2019/2020 school year, marking a more than 39% increase. The numbers this year are slightly down from the 2020/2021 school year, when 65,571 students were homeschooled.
Astronomers organize lobbying group to block satellite constellations
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) has now created an office to lobby governments worldwide to block the coming commercial launch of numerous satellite constellations.
The IAU claims that the first goal of this new office will be to study the effects of these satellites on ground-based astronomy accompanied by an effort to work with industry to mitigate those effects.
That is a lie. This is the office’s real purpose:
Another role for the center will be to create national and international laws and norms for what regulators allow in orbit. “We need to codify these good intentions, to have some backup,” says Richard Green of the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory. “We’ll take a two-pronged approach: Cooperate and develop legislation to apply if necessary.” IAU and other bodies are working to convince the United Nations’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the need for legislation. “We are confident that we will have guidelines that will have to be followed by companies in the near future,” Benvenuti says. Cosmologist Aparna Venkatesan of the University of San Francisco says it would be good if there were laws in the United States and elsewhere that echoed the influential U.S. Clean Air Act: “Many of us dream of a Clean Skies Act.”
Rather than realize that things are changing and Earth-based astronomy is becoming obsolete, the astronomers wish to use the force of law to block progress by others so that they can continue to live in the past.
The time to have moved all cutting edge astronomical research off the planet arrived more than three decades ago. The astronomers refused to recognize this, focusing instead on building giant telescopes on the ground that had less capability than the Hubble Space Telescope and were dogged by political and engineering challenges that hindered their success.
Had astronomers instead focused on building many small orbiting optical telescopes, the threat of satellite constellations now would be minimal. Instead, astronomers would be poised to build the bigger space-based telescopes they need. Instead, they are grounded, with the needed future space-based telescopes possibly decades away.
February 4, 2022 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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InSight resumes limited science operations
InSight on February 5th resumed science operations, reactivating its seismometer to record Martian quakes.
As I suspected in my previous InSight update, the lander’s life is still coming to an end.
The mission, though, has been grappling with a gradual decline in the spacecraft’s power because of dust accumulating on its solar arrays. Unlike the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, whose arrays were regularly cleaned by atmospheric activity, dust has continued to accumulate on InSight’s arrays. At a meeting of MEPAG in June 2021, Banerdt projected that power levels would drop below that needed to keep the spacecraft alive in the spring of 2022.
That date has been pushed out slightly, but he said the long-term outlook for the lander still does not look promising. “Our current projections indicate that the energy will drop below that required to operate the payload in the May/June time frame and probably below survivability some time near the end of the year,” he said.
They might still squeeze a month or two more from the lander, but unless they are very lucky and a dust devil blows across it, the end is coming.