The Poor Refugee Who Invented Patek Philippe
An evening pause: The history of business is too often ignored, even though it is the lifeblood of our modern technological society. Here is just one example.
Hat tip Cotour.
Year: 2022
A large majority of today’s college students think blacklisting is a good thing
The user manual for the modern generation
The modern dark age: Old-fashioned Americans, who believe in free speech and tolerance, often assume that the spate of cruel blacklisting stories that now dominate our society are merely the actions of a few isolated individuals who have happened to gain a position of power and are abusing it.
This assumption could not be more wrong. We are entering a future where blacklisting, censorship, and the abuse of power will become the norm, because apparently the new generation thinks such things are always justified, if they have been offended in any way. From a recent poll of 2,000 students at 130 colleges:
In one eye-opening finding, 74 percent of undergrads endorse the view that a professor who says “something that students find offensive” should be reported to the university. By a majority almost as lopsided, 65 percent believe that a fellow student who says something they consider offensive should be turned in. That informers’ mindset is especially pronounced among students who identify themselves as politically liberal, fully 85 percent of whom would report a professor who offends them. But even among self-identified conservatives, a solid majority, 56 percent, are of the same mindset. [emphasis in original]
SpaceX successfully launches another 46 Starlink satellites
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to place another 46 Starlink satellites into orbit.
The first stage, completing its fourth flight, landed successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific.
This was SpaceX’s 32nd launch in 2022, exceeding the record of 31 launches it set last year, and doing so only a little more than halfway through the year.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
32 SpaceX
23 China
9 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
4 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 45 to 23 in the national rankings, and the entire globe combined 45 to 39.
Collapsed dunes in Jezero Crater
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo above, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 20, 2022 by one of high resolution cameras on the rover Perseverance. It shows what appears to be a collapsed dune on the floor of Jezero Crater.
The arrows mark the highest dune ridge line that suddenly ends at a cliff, with the sand that is piled up at its base appearing almost like it flowed like thick mud outward away from that cliff. Apparently, that material broke off in one single event sometime in the past.
Note the many parallel lines pointing outward from the base of the cliff. These lines appear to reflect the internal structure visible in the cliff itself. Somehow, when that sand collapsed, it flowed away while retaining some of that structure.
When this collapse happened is unclear. I don’t think it has happened recently, since Perseverance’s arrival, but I could be wrong.
China rethinking its proposed heavy lift rocket to make it a Starship clone
Chinese rocket designers appear to be rethinking the proposed design of the Long March 9 heavy lift rocket that China is building, switching from an expendable clone of NASA’s SLS to a reusable clone of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy.
The original design had called for three expendable stages and four strap-on expendable boosters using kerosene fuel, and was targeting a 2030 launch. The new design is two reusable stages, with the first having 26 engines fueled by methane, and would launch by 2035.
The image to the right is a screen capture from a presentation given by a long time rocket designer in China, viewable here cued to this point. Note the two large rockets on the right. The smaller is a two stage version, while the larger is a three stage version. Both look remarkably like Starship/Superheavy.
Isar Aerospace signs deal to launch from French Guiana
Capitalism in space: The German smallsat rocket startup Isar Aerospace has now signed a deal with the French space agency CNES to use one of its launchpads in French Guiana for launches of its new Spectrum rocket.
The Diamant pad was built more than a half-century ago for the French rocket of the same name, but has been dormant for decades. CNES is now working to convert the facility into a multi-user site for small launch vehicles, and Isar is the first company the agency selected in an open competition to use the site.
Isar also has a deal to launch from Norway. As recently as seven months ago the company was claiming its first test launch would occur there before the end of ’22. All told, Isar has three different launch contracts and has raised almost $200 million in investment capital.
Draper wins NASA contract to put a lander on the Moon’s far side
Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday awarded a $73 million contract to the space company Draper to place a lander on the Moon’s far side by 2025.
The lander, called SERIES-2 by Draper, will deliver to Schrödinger Basin three experiments to collect seismic data, measure the heat flow and electrical conductivity of the lunar subsurface and measure electromagnetic phenomena created by the interaction of the solar wind and plasma with the lunar surface.
The mission is the eighth NASA has awarded to date as part of CLPS, but the first to go to the lunar farside. The only mission by any country to land on the far side of the moon is China’s Chang’e-4 mission, which successfully landed in Von Kármán Crater in January 2019 and deployed the Yutu 2 rover that remains operational today.
With this award, there are presently five American companies with contracts to put landers on the Moon, Intuitive Machines, Astrobotic, Firefly, and Masten. Masten however shut down operations recently. This new contract to Draper for almost the exact same amount that had been awarded to Masten appears to replace Masten in the program.
Angel City Chorale – Africa
An evening pause: I posted a different and great performance back in 2014. This performance is I think even better.
Hat tip Doug “Space” Plata.
Using the Wuhan panic to kill children
The shocking rise of excess mortality since young people
began getting the jab
The evidence continues to pour in: Not only were the authoritarian polices imposed by governments worldwide following the arrival of COVID in 2020 a total failure — doing nothing to prevent the spread of the virus — it now appears the edicts forcing millions to get the COVID jab and wear masks might very well have caused serious harm, even death, to many individuals for whom the virus posed no threat at all.
And it more and more appears that the worst victims of these failed policies were children.
The following stories, all published since my last Wuhan panic update on June 30th, point specifically to the failure of the jab:
- New Medical Study Shows COVID Booster Shots May Be Harmful to the Immune System
- German government admits hundreds of thousands of people have had severe side effects following mRNA shots
- New research from the public health schools at Harvard and Yale suggests the boosted fared worse against the first Omicron subvariant than the non-boosted
These new research confirms many previous studies. For example, in 2021 the American Heart Association issued its own warning about mRNA vaccines, stating that this drug could “dramatically increase risk of developing heart disease.” Other earlier research can be found at my own reports on February 14th, March 23rd, March 30th, May 11th, May 13th, and June 30th. The data increasingly demonstrates that the COVID shots not only accomplished practically nothing in stopping the virus, those shots had side effects that have unnecessarily harmed possibly millions.
Similarly, studies continue to confirm what a hundred years of past research had found, that masks are essentially useless in stopping the spread of a virus such as COVID, and can actually increase your chances of getting this or other diseases.
» Read more
SpaceX launch aborted 46 seconds before launch
Capitalism in space: In what has become a rare event for SpaceX, the company was forced to abort a launch of a Falcon 9 rocket today carrying 46 Starlink satellites only 46 seconds before launch.
The company has scrubbed a few launches in the past three years due to weather, but I think this is the first launch abort apparently due to a technical issue in several years.
No details were given for the abort, but whatever the issue was, it was apparently not serious, as the launch team immediately announced that they have recycled the launch to its back-up date tomorrow.
Perseverance spots a string on Mars!
Click for full image.
According to the Perseverance science team, they believe the strange spaghetti-like object to the right, taken by one of the rover’s hazard avoidance camera’s on July 12, 2022, is actually a piece of string that fell here during the rover’s landing in February 2021.
The string could be from the rover or its descent stage, a component similar to a rocket-powered jet pack used to safely lower the rover to the planet’s surface, according to a spokesperson for the Perseverance mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Perseverance had not previously been in the area where the string was found, so it’s likely the wind blew it there, the spokesperson said.
The string, which appears to be a few inches across, was apparently gone four days later, when another hazard avoidance picture was taken of the same spot
An official description from the scientists is expected in a week or so.
The earliest galaxy so far seen?
Scientists using the James Webb Space Telescope now think they have identified a galaxy formed only 330 million years after the Big Bang.
The red smudge in the centre of this image [to the right] is thought to be a galaxy with a redshift of around z=13, as seen by the NIRCam instrument on the James Webb Space Telescope. This redshift estimate is based on photometry so the object remains a candidate rather than a confirmed high-redshift galaxy, but if confirmed spectroscopically this would be the highest-redshift galaxy yet observed.
You can read the research paper itself here [pdf]. The galaxy is actually very young, and its nature, along with a second also described by the research, appears to contradict expectations. From the paper’s abstract:
These sources, if confirmed, join GNz11 in defying number density forecasts for luminous galaxies based on Schechter UV luminosity functions, which require a survey area > 10× larger than we have
studied here to find such luminous sources at such high redshifts. They extend evidence from lower redshifts for little or no evolution in the bright end of the UV luminosity function into the cosmic dawn epoch, with implications for just how early these galaxies began forming. This, in turn, suggests that future deep JWST observations may identify relatively bright galaxies to much earlier epochs than might have been anticipated. [emphasis mine]
In other words, this early data from Webb suggests that galaxies formed much faster than expected after the Big Bang. This either means all the theories describing the Bang are wrong, or that it might not have even happened.