Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
Quite cool. As the tweet notes, this “was the hottest and fastest [fairing return] we’ve ever attempted.”
Most of this is simply lobbying for more money. The shortage of plutonium will only matter if NASA’s planetary program gets a gigantic budget boost.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! My headline paraphrases slightly the witches’ chant from Shakespeare’s MacBeth, if only to make it more accurately describe the picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here. Taken on January 5, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), it shows a patch of mid-latitude terrain in the icy northern lowland plains of Mars.
While some of the craters here were certainly caused by impact, it is also likely that most were instead cryo-volcanic in nature, whereby ice bubbles up from below as changing temperature conditions — none of which need to be very warm — cause it to either melt temporarily into liquid or sublimate directly into a gas. The dark pimplelike hole on the picture’s right edge is a perfect example, with the hole sitting at the top of a cone.
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Megan Brock, without question still
being targeted by the government
Bring a gun to a knife fight: When Pennsylvania parent Megan Brock demanded, under her state’s right-to-know law, public documents of the Bucks County health department concerning its decisions to impose Wuhan flu lockdowns and school closures (with the office of open records ruling in her favor), county officials then sued her multiple times to try to prevent her access to the records.
The court has now ruled against the county’s lawsuits, while also ruling that the county had operated in “bad faith” and fined it $1,500, the maximum allowed by law.
After the court conducted an in-camera review of the records, Judge Denise M. Bowman ruled on April 28 that more than half of Brock’s requests, which were made under the state’s Right-to-Know Law (RTK), had been withheld “in bad faith.” She ordered the county to release certain documents and pay $1,500 in sanctions for each of the two lawsuits brought against Brock, the maximum allowed under RTK.
You can read the ruling here [pdf]. It notes in particular how county officials had even refused to provide the court one of these documents for review, demonstrating clearly its bad faith.
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I appeared on Robert Pratt’s Pratt on Texas podcast yesterday, doing a short ten minute interview about the lawsuit filed against the FAA that is attempting to shut down Starship/Superheavy development.
That podcast is embedded below. It can also be listened to here, beginning at 12:15 minutes.
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Click for full image.
The Super-Pressure Balloon Imaging Telescope (Super-BIT) that has been circling Antarctica for the last two weeks has now obtained two more more high resolution wide-field astronomical pictures.
The picture to the right, cropped to post here, is of Messier 104 (the Sombrero Galaxy). While the telescope cannot zoom in closer than this to such objects, it is able to get much wider and sharp pictures, covering an entire galaxy or nebula that ground-based telescope using adaptive optics (designed to counter the fuzziness caused by the atmosphere) cannot. Adaptive optics only work on very small fields of view, thus making it unable to observe some of the larger nearby astronomical objects like galaxies and nebulae.
If you look at the live stream of the balloon’s track, it has now almost completed its second circuit of Antarctica.
Click to watch full animation.
Using data from a variety of space- and ground-based telescopes, astronomers now think they have recorded the moment a star similar to our Sun actually swallowed a planet thought to be comparable to Jupiter or smaller.
Once the science team put all the evidence together, they realized the dust they were seeing with NEOWISE [in orbit] was being generated as the planet spiraled into the star’s puffy atmosphere. Like other older stars, the star had begun to expand in size as it aged, bringing it closer to the orbiting planet. As the planet skimmed the surface of the star, it pulled hot gas off the star that then drifted outward and cooled, forming dust. In addition, material from the disintegrating planet blew outward, also forming dust.
What happened next, according to the astronomers, triggered the flare of optical light seen by ZTF [survey telescope in California]. “The planet plunged into the core of the star and got swallowed whole. As it was doing this, energy was transferred to the star,” De explains. “The star blew off its outer layers to get rid of the energy. It expanded and brightened, and the brightening is what ZTF registered.”
Some of this expanding stellar material then escaped from the star and traveled outward. Like the boiled-off layers of the star and planet that previously drifted outward, this material also cooled to form dust. NEOWISE is detecting the infrared glow of all the newly minted dust.
The picture above is a screen capture from a short artist’s animation created to illustrate what happened. The most amazing aspect of this event is how long the planet skimmed the surface of that star. It appears it did so for several orbits at least.
An evening pause: Better late than never. I forgot to schedule some pauses. This one is fascinating because of the history of technology it reveals.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
These are the same two images the company posted on April 10th, so either nothing is happening, or they are simply not telling us anything.
The idea is to simulate the lunar environment and find out ways to eliminate dust issues.
It appears the launch tower will be completed one month early, in May, with the foundation hole for the second pad 96% dug.
The company hopes with this plan it will be bought whole by a single buyer and thus saved. There remains no guarantee that will happen. The auction will now occur on May 18th.
All told, completed or parts of 11 Starships exist, as well as completed or parts of 8 Superheavies.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 17, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) by the camera team not as part of any particular research project but in order to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule so as to maintain its proper temperature. In such cases the camera team tries to pick potentially interesting spots.
This cliff, about 1,100 feet high, is the north wall of a major volcano channel flowing across the Tharsis Bulge, the lava plains that surround Mars’ giant volcanoes. Located in the dry equatorial regions, there is no near surface ice here, but a lot of dust, much of it likely volcanic ash. In the full picture are several ancient craters, all of which are almost entirely buried by this dust and ash.
The cliff wall itself is made up of numerous layers, each representing a past volcanic flood lava event that covered this region with a new flow of material. These events occurred over more than a billion years.
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NOAA this week once again published an update of its monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with some additional details included to provide some context.
In April the number of sunspots dropped again, for the second time in the past three months. The high activity previously had suggested that the solar maximum was going to be much higher than predicted, or possibly would come sooner than expected. The drop however now suggests that the fast rise in sunspot activity that we have seen since the beginning of the ramp up to solar maximum in 2020 might finally be abating.
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Whitworth University, where teaching close-mindedness
is our number one goal!
They’re coming for you next: When the conservative Turning Point USA chapter at the private Christian Whitworth University in Washington state arranged a lecture from Xi Van Fleet — a refugee from communist China — it discovered it could not do so because it needed the approval of the college’s student organization, and the leaders of that organization voted 9-4 to blacklist that speaker.
On April 12, Whitworth’s student government voted 9-4 to deny a conservative group’s request to invite Chinese dissident Xi Van Fleet to speak at the university in Spokane, Washington. Van Fleet, now a Virginia resident, escaped Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution and frequently criticizes ideas such as critical race theory and hecklers’ vetoes that, in her view, mirror it.
The minutes of this student government meeting are available online [pdf]. If you read them, you find that it is very clear these students do not believe in freedom of speech and instead think the most important thing a college can do is to protect them from hearing ideas they don’t like. These university-level government activists also exhibited an incredible level of general ignorance. Consider this comment from Niraj Pandey, listed as an International Student Senator:
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Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released today. It shows a galaxy only 30 million light years away, making almost our neighbor. From the caption:
NGC 3489 has an active galactic nucleus, or AGN. The AGN sits at the center of the galaxy, is extremely bright, and emits radiation across the entire electromagnetic spectrum as the black hole devours material that gets too close to it.
This lenticular galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy, which is a class of AGN that is dimmer than other types of AGNs. They generally don’t outshine the rest of the galaxy, so the galaxy surrounding the black hole is clearly visible. Other types of AGNs emit so much radiation that it is almost impossible to observe the host galaxy.
That active nucleus is the bright dominate sphere at the galaxy’s center, large enough to overwhelm a large percentage of the rest of the galaxy. Its existence and dominance suggests that this galaxy is aging, and is beginning the transition from a spiral to an elliptical. In fact, its arms have already mostly vanished, and there is at present little star-formation on-going.
According to an official from the startup SUAS Aerospace, Ireland is an ideal location for the creation of a new spaceport.
Mr O’Halloran, who is now vice chairman of Irish space company SUAS Aerospace, said space vehicles could be launched from Ireland for telecommunications, environmental monitoring, or medical experiments.
…He later told the Irish Examiner: “There are loads of companies in Europe that need to have a facility of a launch pad, or a spaceport, and by and large they are all heading towards the Azores. The UK is now starting to set up spaceports, but they are now outside the EU. Ireland is ideal as a launching site.”
This Irish company’s focus, according to its website, is “…to build a leading European Space Port providing flexible commercial satellite launch facilities with provision for engine and rocket testing.” And it wants to do it in Ireland. O’Halloran’s speech was an effort to gin up both private and government support for the project, including a commitment of the Irish government to provide it the land it needs for such a site.
There are already three spaceports under development within the EU, in Spain, Norway, and Sweden, all of which at the moment are for suborbital rockets exclusively. Ireland’s location could make it a better choice for orbital launches, as it has many more options for flight paths over the Atlantic without crossing land.
An UP Aerospace suborbital rocket exploded yesterday only four seconds after launch in New Mexico, destroying a number of private and NASA science and commercial payloads.
An UP Aerospace rocket, 20 feet tall and carrying a NASA payload, exploded moments after liftoff today. The unfortunate event not only affected the NASA TechRise Student Challenge payloads but also delayed a poignant tribute to the late NASA astronaut, Phillip K. Chapman, and chemist Louise Ann O’Deen.
The rocket was set to launch the cremated remains of Chapman, NASA’s first Australian-born American astronaut, finally granting him his long-awaited journey to space.
Chapman and O’Deen’s remains were payloads from the commercial company Celestis. The thirteen NASA payloads were part of its TechRise Student Challenge program for 6th to 12th grade students.
An evening pause: A bit of energy to start the week. Performed live 1991. For those unfamiliar with this rock piece (like me), I think it helpful here to turn on captions to find out what the performers and audience are singing.
Hat tip James Street.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
This is a Reddit discussion, so nothing is confirmed. Someone else notes the company has over 7500 employees according to Linkedin, while another notes again Bezos’ billion dollar per year commitment to the company. None of that has yet produced an orbital rocket, or a robust production line of BE-4 rocket engines.
To be used to test the upper stage? Its engines? A dummy stage? And when? New Glenn development started almost a decade ago. One wonders.
No word on when it goes into operation
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the many many many layers that are found in the cliffs of Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon in the solar system and far far larger that Earth’s Grand Canyon.
The elevation difference between the red dots is just under 4,000 feet. Yet that high point is still more than 7,000 feet below the rim of the canyon, more than thirty miles to the south. And the lower dot is still about 18,000 feet above the low point in this side canyon of Valles Marineris, about thirty miles away to the northeast.
In other words, in sixty miles from rim to floor the canyon at this location drops about 25,000 feet, only 4,000 feet less than the height of Mount Everest. Compare that with the Grand Canyon’s slopes, which drops in eleven miles about 5,000 feet, beginning at the main south rim lookout at the start of Bright Angel trail.
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Starship/Superheavy at T+4:02, just after the self-destruct command
was issued on April 20, 2023. It also appears to be the fate of SpaceX’s
entire Boca Chica operation, if the environmental radicals get their way.
A group of environmental groups as well as a non-profit corporation calling itself the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas, Inc, today filed a lawsuit against the Federal Aviation Administration FAA), demanding it shut down SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility and block all further Superheavy/Starship launches.
You can read the lawsuit here [pdf]. Its essence is contained in these two paragraphs:
The area surrounding the SpaceX facility at Boca Chica is a biologically diverse and essential habitat area for many species, including federally protected wildlife and animals that are considered sacred to the Carrizo/Comecrudo People, such as the critically endangered ocelot. The SpaceX facility is smack in the middle of publicly owned conservation, park, and recreation lands, including a National Wildlife Refuge, two State Parks, a State Wildlife Management Area, and a State Coastal Preserve. These lands are of extraordinary conservation value for a range of federally and state lists wildlife and other protected species such as migratory birds. Bird species from both the Central and Mississippi flyways converge there, making it an essential wintering and stopover area for migratory birds as they move north and south each year.
SpaceX activities authorized in the FONSI/ROD [the environmental reassessment issued last year] have and will adversely affect the surrounding wildlife habitat and communities. In addition to harm from construction activities and increased vehicle traffic, rocket launches result in intense heat, noise, and light pollution. Furthermore, the rocket launches and testing result in explosions which spread debris across surrounding habitat and cause brush/forest fires — including one that recently burned 68 acres of adjacent National Wildlife Refuge. The FAA calls these explosions “anomalies,” but in fact they occur frequently, with at least 8 over the past 5 years. FAA acknowledged that many more such “anomalies” are expected over the next 5 years. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has found that prior SpaceX rocket explosions harmed protected wildlife and designated habitat in violation of the Endangered Species Act (ESA).
In other words, rockets and launch sites should never be placed inside wildlife refuges, because such activity is detrimental to wildlife.
A more false statement cannot be made. Under this conclusion the launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, which have been operating in the middle of a wildlife refuge now for more than six decades, should be shut down immediately. All the wildlife there must certainly be dead!
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Click for full image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right has been significantly reduced but also significantly sharpened to post here. It was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a recent survey of “jellyfish” galaxies, galaxies located in galaxy clusters where there is a large concentration of galaxies whose combined gravity and intergalactic environment acts to pull material or “tendrils” out from the galaxy.
Rather than crop the image to focus on that single large central jellyfish galaxy, I have instead sharpened the much-reduced full photo to bring out clearly the number of surrounding galaxies. There is only one Milky Way star in this picture, the object with the four diffraction spikes in the lower-right. Every other dot is a galaxy, many of which can be seen to be very strangely shaped in the original full resolution image. In fact, I strongly recommend you click on the picture to explore that original image, just to see the variety of galaxy shapes.
The point of this picture today however is not to illustrate the wide variety of galaxies that can exist, but to underline the vast and largely incomprehensible scale of the universe. The large galaxy is thought to be 650 million light years away, which means it took light traveling at 186,000 miles per second that many years to get here. The surrounding galaxies are also all tens to hundreds of millions of light years from each other. Yet, their combined gravity, almost infinitesimal in strength, is enough to warp the shape of each.
We understand these numbers and facts intellectually, but do we understand them in reality? I think it is difficult, even if you work hard to come up with a scaled comparison. For example, it took nine years for the New Horizons spacecraft to get from Earth to Pluto, a distance of about 4.5 light hours. And New Horizons was the fastest traveling probe ever launched, moving at 36,400 miles per hour when it left Earth. Yet, this distance is nothing compared to the distance between these galaxies.
The vastness of existence really is beyond our comprehension. That we try to comprehend it speaks well of the human desire to achieve the impossible.
With SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy having just completed the first of three launches for Viasat’s new geosynchronous constellation of communication satellites, the satellite company has announced that it is cancelling its launch contract with Ariane-6 for the third launch.
The decision means the launch contract is up for grabs for the third ViaSat 3 internet satellite, the last of a three-satellite constellation Viasat is deploying to provide global broadband connectivity from space.
Viasat announced in 2018 it selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance, and Arianespace to each launch one ViaSat 3 satellite, awarding launch contracts to three industry leaders.
The ULA launch, on its Atlas-5 rocket, is still scheduled for either late this year or early next.
The development of Ariane-6 however is years behind schedule. Furthermore, Arianespace has given priority on Ariane-6 to all of the ESA launches that formerly were going to be launched on Russian Soyuz rockets, further delaying Viasat’s launch.
For Viasat, the delays have become unacceptable, and it has now opened that third launch to bidding. Though both ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets could do the job, neither is operational either. It appears SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is the only rocket available and is therefore almost certain to get the contract, a conclusion further confirmed by the timing of this announcement, just prior to that successful Falcon Heavy launch.
