Using its Soyuz-2 rocket Russia tonight successfully launched a new Progress freighter to ISS.
The spacecraft will take two days to rendezvous and dock with ISS, thus delivering 2.5 tons of cargo.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
48 SpaceX
45 China
18 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 68 to 45 in the national rankings, though it now trails the rest of the world combined 72 to 68.
An evening pause: Hat tip Phill Oltmann.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
This solid-fueled rocket will likely launch from the sea platform developed out of Haiyang. It has yet to complete an orbital launch.
The tweet includes a cool picture of a protein crystal. From the experiment’s abstract:
The Ring Sheared Drop investigation examines the formation and growth of amyloids and fibrils without the complications associated with the solid walls of a container, because in microgravity, surface tension provides containment of the liquid. Fibrous, extracellular protein deposits found in organs and tissues, amyloids are associated with neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Results could contribute to better understanding of these diseases as well as to development of advanced materials.
Forgive me if I am skeptical about this work. Protein crystal experiments have been going on on ISS now for more than two decades, without any clarity whether any have actually turned out useful on Earth. When I have seen presentations about them, I have repeatedly wondered if this isn’t more about creating papers and funding, not actual new knowledge that has a useful application.
If I am wrong I would love to be educated otherwise.
Launched on August 4th, China has released no information about its mission or its planned duration. The program however got new funding from China’s science bureaucracy in September.
Bring a gun to a knife fight: A new group, dubbed No College Mandates, is now campaigning nationwide against the effort of universities to blacklist anyone who has not gotten any COVID shots.
Formed in December 2021, the organization recently launched a protest letter campaign to colleges that still require the vaccine and boosters and have “forced these young adults into compliance,” according to a news release.
“We decided to target colleges because they were among the first educational institutions mandating vaccines,” Lucia Sinatra, co-founder of the group, told The College Fix via email. “Colleges have known since August 2021 that the virus can transmit equally between unvaccinated and vaccinated individuals yet they mandated boosters and some have begun to mandate the bivalent booster,” she said.
The organization has sent its protest letter to over 300 colleges. The letter to Yale is typical, noting in detail how the CDC has now admitted that the jab does not stop transmission and that the mandates were pointless. Yet the college still insists that teachers, students, and visitors all must get the jab, plus at least one booster. As the letter notes, these senseless rules do nothing to prevent the Wuhan flu, while normalizing blacklisting.
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China’s Long March 5B rocket had now been rolled out to its launchpad, carrying the new Mengtian module for China’s Tiangong-3 space station.
The launch is presently scheduled for October 31, 2022. Assuming China has not upgraded the engines on the rocket’s core stage, that stage will tumble back to Earth, uncontrolled, sometime in the following week. Since it is large enough to survive re-entry, it will hit the ground, thus threatening every habitable location under its orbital path. By allowing this to happen China violates the Outer Space Treaty, to which it is a signatory.
Nor will this likely be the last time China does this. Though this module completes China’s station, as presently designed, this will not be the last Long March 5B launch. China plans to use it put its Hubble-class space telescope into orbit, as well as other things.
Relativity has begun stacking its Terran-1 rocket with a goal of soon rolling it out to the launchpad for static fire tests.
The launch date itself remains uncertain. Though the company hopes to lift-off before the end of the year, it also has not committed to that goal.
“We are confident in our tech readiness to launch this year, and we’re still marching toward that,” Ellis said. “But there are a few external factors as we’re getting close to the end of the year that could impact the timeline for us. It’s not a guarantee, but it could.”
Those external factors include other spaceport users in Florida, including uncertainty around the mid-November launch of NASA’s Space Launch System rocket, and blackout periods as part of the military’s Holiday Airspace Release Plan. This effectively precludes launches around Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day due to the high volume of airline flights.
Ellis said the company is progressing well toward securing a launch license for “Good Luck Have Fun,” and noted that the Federal Aviation Administration accepted its methodology for debris mitigation as well as its trajectory analysis software.
The article at the link adds some additional details about the company’s plans. This Terran-1 rocket appears to be its equivalent of SpaceX’s Falcon-1. The company plans to quickly replace it with its much larger Terran-R rocket, comparable to the Falcon-9 in power and price. And it already has won $1.2 billion in launch contracts, and hopes to launch within two years.
I wonder if Terran-R will launch before Blue Origin’s much touted but repeatedly delayed New Glenn rocket. The article itself appears to think so, since it focuses entirely on the competition between SpaceX and Relativity, as if Blue Origin and New Glenn do not even exist.
In order for ISS to avoid one of the approximately 585 pieces of space junk still in orbit that were produced when Russia destroyed its defunct Cosmos 1408 satellite in a November 2021 anti-satellite test, engineers fired the engines of a docked Progress freighter yesterday for just over five minutes.
Without the burn the debris would have flown within three miles of the station, too close for comfort or anyone’s margin of error.
According to a report in September, of these 585 pieces, most will burn up in the atmosphere by ’25, with only 38 pieces left afterward to pose a threat to other operating satellites and manned spacecraft.
Researchers working independent from SpaceX and without any of the company’s proprietary data, have found a way to turn the Starlink internet constellation — now about 3,000 satellites strong — into a method of pinpointing one’s location, thus making it an alternative to GPS-type satellites.
To be clear, no one is accessing Starlink user data here. The sync sequences are just strings of timings and other data that the machines use to stay in touch — the payload data is entirely separate.
In the paper, due to the fact that the signal was being targeted at an actual Starlink user terminal, the location had to be for that terminal too, and they were able to get it within 30 meters. Not better than GPS, obviously, but it could be quicker and eventually more accurate if SpaceX were to give the project its blessing.
A software update that slightly adjusts how the satellites send their signals and a bit of data on correcting for variance between their clocks, and Humphreys suggests Starlink transmissions could be used to locate oneself to within a meter.
You can read the paper here [pdf].
It seems a no-brainer that at some point SpaceX management will recognize the money they can make from this extra capability, and will figure out the best way to produce and sell handheld units. It also appears that there will be profit in allowing others to also tag on.
Virgin Orbit has been issued its marine license from the United Kingdom for its planned October 29, 2022 launch from Cornwall, the first such orbital launch from the British Isles.
Virgin Orbit proposes to conduct a maximum of one launch in 2022 and approximately two launches per year over the next 8 years (January 2023-December 2030).
The licence issued by MMO covers the 2022 launch, the first of its kind in the UK. As there is material to be deposited into the sea that will be loaded in the UK, the activity requires a marine licence from MMO, as required by The Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009.
The ever-growing reach of government bureaucracy is worldwide. Though Virgin Orbit’s airplane, carrying the LauncherOne rocket and its seven smallsats, is taking off from Cornwall, the release of that rocket will not occur until it is over the Atlantic, with the expendable first stage falling into the ocean west of Portugal. Yet somehow the company must get permission of these UK bureaucrats — as well as American ones — to fly.
An evening pause: I especially like the clarity of her guitar playing.
Hat tip Tom Wilson.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. To my readers, I am having an off day, so please forgive the low output from me.
The other methane-fueled rocket engines come from SpaceX (on Starship/Superheavy) and Blue Origin. ULA was supposed to have launched with Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine two years ago. The launch won’t happen before 2023. SpaceX’s first Starship orbital attempt could happen any time before the end of the year.
This Chinese rocket could thus be the first methane-fueled rocket to reach orbit.
The tentative return date is 2029. The launch itself is set for next year.
From the link:
Launching with JPSS-2 is NASA’s Low-Earth Orbit Flight Test of an Inflatable Decelerator (LOFTID) technology demonstration. After JPSS-2 safely reaches orbit, LOFTID will follow a re-entry trajectory from low-Earth orbit to demonstrate the inflatable heat shield’s ability to slow down and survive re-entry.
This is merely the company bringing Bridenstine in to grease the wheels of Washington’s increasingly oppressive bureaucracy. He won’t add any engineering or management skills to Firefly, in the slightest.
The citizen is sovereign, and your vote demonstrates that power
I first posted my election choices in Arizona on October 11, 2022, the day before the start of early mail-in voting in this state. However, I am now posting my choices again because there were two propositions (#128 and #130) then that I was unsure about how I wished to vote. I have now done a bit more research, and made my choices. I think my analysis will be useful to my readers.
I have also included more information about the candidates running.
I want to once again emphasize that though I am not partisan, based on the steady decline of thought in the Democratic Party combined with its increased passion for arresting and violently harassing its opposition, I cannot at present vote for anyone in that party. I wish this was not the case, but I also believe strongly that if American voters throw out as many Democrats as possible in November, it will allow for that party to reform itself. With the defeat of its present leadership, the party will be faced with a stark choice: find new leaders, shift gears, or die (allowing a new party to replace it). With any of these options, the voters would be provided with a new choice in future elections, coming from a different direction.
As a perfect example of the mindless corruption that has now taken over the Democratic Party, witness President Joe Biden’s statement this past weekend throwing his full support behind the castration and mutilation of children in order to change their sex, as advocated by the “trans” movement — which in plain English is a movement of cross-dressers demanding more power over everyone else.
The president denounced Republican states that have passed laws attempting to ban or limit sex change surgeries and transition treatments – like hormone blockers – for children who identify as non binary or transgender. Biden spoke with a panel of six progressive activists for the NowThis News presidential forum on Friday, which aired on Sunday. One of the six panelists was TikTok star Dylan Mulvaney who is documenting their transition from a male to trans woman.
When asked if red states should have the right to pass laws limiting access to gender-affirming treatments, Biden said: ‘I don’t think any state or anybody should have the right to do that.’
‘As a moral question and as a legal question, I just think it’s wrong,’ the president added.
This corruption in the Democratic Party has also made the Republican Party unreliable, which is why the Republican slate in Arizona is so important. All of the state’s major candidates (governor, senate, secretary of state, attorney general) are not from the established party. They are mostly Trump outsiders, who are running on platforms calling for major reform. Giving them all a win will send shockwaves throughout the political landscape, on both sides of the political aisle. The establishment controlling both parties might finally realize they must pay attention to the citizens of the country, not their own wishes.
All these factors suggest that this is a truly significant election. or as Doug Ross noted in this excellent essay:
This is our generation’s fork in the road and the stakes of our decision could not be higher. If we are to protect our society from the inevitable decline and despotism that has infected so many societies since the beginning of time, in whom should we trust? If we are to shield our children from the tyranny against which our founders fought and so many Americans shed blood, in whom should we put our faith?
I contend that we must fight the anti-Constitutional counter-revolution using every political tool at our disposal. We must pledge to return our country to the rule of law, as it was originally defined by our founders and codified in the Constitution. For anything less condemns our descendants to the fate that Thucydides described. The choice is clear. The question is simple.
Which road will you choose?
Thus, below are my updated final election choices. Note too that I have not contributed any money to any of these candidates, nor have I received any money from any candidate or party as well. These opinions are solely my own.
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