Year: 2023

NASA celebrates the 120th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight

8:58 am

Link here. The NASA article does a thorough job of not only describing that first powered flight from Kitty Hawk, it shows how that success is linked to the establishment first of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), which after Sputnik became NASA.

NASA in turn has repeatedly honored the Wright Brothers and their work on subsequent space missions.

Pieces of the Wright Flyer, sometimes called Kitty Hawk, have flown in space, carried there by astronauts with a geographic connection and a sense of history. In 1969, under a special arrangement with the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, like the Wright brothers a native of Ohio, took with him a piece of wood from the Wright Flyer’s left propeller and a piece of muslin fabric (8 by 13 inches) from its upper left wing. The items, stowed in his Lunar Module Eagle personal preference kit, landed with him and fellow astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin at Tranquility Base, and returned to Earth with third crew member Michael Collins in the Command Module Columbia. Visitors can view these items near the Wright Flyer at the NASM.

In 1986, North Carolina native NASA astronaut Michael J. Smith arranged with the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh to take a piece of wood and a swatch of fabric salvaged, and authenticated by Orville Wright, from the damaged Wright Flyer aboard space shuttle Challenger’s STS-51L mission. Although Challenger and its crew perished in the tragic accident, divers recovered the artifacts from the wreckage and visitors can view them at the North Carolina Museum of History.

…A piece of the Wright Flyer has even traveled beyond the Earth-Moon system. When the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, it carried underneath it a four-pound autonomous helicopter named Ingenuity. Engineers attached a small piece of cloth the size of a postage stamp from the Wright Flyer’s wing to a cable underneath the helicopter’s solar panel. On April 19, 2021, when Ingenuity lifted off to a height of 10 feet, it marked the first powered aircraft flight on a world other than Earth. Ingenuity’s first flight lasted 39 seconds in an area NASA named Wright Brothers Field. The United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization gave the field the airport code of JZRO – for Jezero Crater – and the helicopter type designator IGY, with the call-sign INGENUITY.

There is one major difference between NASA and the Wright Brothers. The latter worked independently with private funds given voluntarily. The former has always been a governent operation, funded by coerced taxes. The consequences of this difference are so profound many have written books describing them.

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December 13, 2023 Quick space links – All Russia today

3:32 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • Russia planning to lay off several major managers in manned program

    • The article at the link states that this decision suggests Roscosmos is shifting from space exploration and science to doing military and commercial missions. Sadly, these former communists still don’t understand how freedom works, which if allowed to flourish will end up paying for both.

 

  • Russia’s proposed space station is shrinking

    • This story is related to the first above. Rather than having the new station made up of several modules, like ISS, Tiangong-3, and Mir, Roscosmos’ division that builds its manned spacecraft, Energia, is working out a one-module design comparable to the Soviet Union’s Salyut stations from the 1970s.

In other words, the news from Russia today is that it is recognizing it no longer has the capability to build a manned space program. The decision to invade the Ukraine, and the resulting isolation and loss of its international satellite business, has left Roscosmos very short of cash.

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The end of a 400-mile-long Martian escarpment

2:50 pm

The end of a 400-mile-long escarpment
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It shows the cracked top of a enscarpment, with the bottom point to the west about 2,400 feet lower in elevation.

The north-south cracks at the top of the cliff indicate faults. They also suggest that the cliff itself its slowly separating from eastern plateau. North from this point, beyond the edge of this picture, are several places where such a separation has already occurred, with the collapsed cliff leaving a wide pile of landslide debris at the base.

This cliff actually continues north for another 400 miles, suggesting that the ground shifted along this entire distance, with the ground to the east going up and ground to the west going down. Because the cliff is such a distinct and large feature, it has its own name, Claritas Rupes, “rupes” being the Latin word for cliff.
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The rot in academia is very deep-rooted

1:04 pm

The poison Ivy League
The poison Ivy League: pushing bigotry as goal #1!

Last week I wrote how the bankrupt testimony of the heads of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT in front of Congress, where all three gave legalistic answers when asked whether a call for the genocide of Jews would violate their colleges’ code of conduct, might have finally made ordinary Americans aware of the depravity and corruption that now permeates almost all of American academia.

It certainly appears so, based on the loud and almost universal condemnation of these three college presidents, with numerous calls for their resignations, from both Republicans and Democrats as well as students, teachers, and alumni.

What I did not note however was how deeply rooted that depravity and corruption is within academia, that even if all three of these presidents were immediately fired it would likely change nothing.

In fact, we can see the depth of that depravity by the response from all three colleges to this controversy. Only one president has so far been removed, and there only partly. At UPenn, President M. Elizabeth Magill submitted her resignation as president on December 9, 2023, after a meeting of the college’s board of trustees. That resignation however did not sever her ties to the school. She is still a tenured faculty member at the college’s law school, with the chairman of the board issuing his own endorsement of her good qualities (even as he resigned as well).

In other words, the university is very sorry you were offended. Magill did nothing wrong, we are doing nothing wrong, and we are going to do as little as we can to get the heat off of us as quickly as possible, so that we can then resume doing what we have been doing, indoctrinating racial hatred and anti-Semitism in all students.

Meanwhile at Harvard, the board of trustees responded by issuing a full endorsement of its own president, Claudine Gay, refusing to sanction her in any way for her willingness to allow anti-Semitism at Harvard. Worse, this endorsement occurred after news reports revealed she had repeatedly committed plagiarism in her published work. From the trustee’s statement:
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FCC denies Starlink $886 million grant

9:48 am

Despite the fact that SpaceX Starlink constellation is presently providing internet access to more rural customers than any company worldwide, the FCC yesterday announced that it will not award the company a $886 million subsidy under its program for expanding broadband service to rural areas.

The FCC announced today that it won’t award Elon Musk’s Starlink an $886 million subsidy from the Universal Service Fund for expanding broadband service in rural areas. The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t able to “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”

That was the same reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink’s bid last year, which led to this appeal. SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload “low-latency internet to 642,925 locations in 35 states,” funded by the RDOF.

This decision can only be explained by utterly political reasons. SpaceX right now is experiencing a booming business, with its traffic up two and a half times from last year,almost all of which is in rural areas. That number is from a news report today, the same day the FCC claims Starlink can’t provide such service. As noted by one SpaceX lawyer:

“Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.”

The initial award was made in December 2020, when Trump was still president. It was first canceled in August 2022, after Biden took over. SpaceX appealed, but today’s announcement says the FCC rejected that appeal.

While there is absolutely no justification to give any company this money — SpaceX is proving private companies don’t need it to provide this service to rural areas — this decision is clearly political, driven by the hate of Elon Musk among Democrats and the Biden administration. They don’t care that SpaceX is a successeful private company providing tens of thousands of jobs as well as good products to Americans. Musk does not support them, and so he must be squashed.

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In 2023 scientists set a new record for the most papers retracted

9:33 am

According to a report in the science journal Nature published today, in 2023 scientists set a new record for the most papers retracted in a single year and illustrating the steady rise of fake papers in recent years.

The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud. Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades, a Nature analysis has found.

The bulk of 2023’s retractions were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley. So far this year, Hindawi journals have pulled more than 8,000 articles, citing factors such as “concerns that the peer review process has been compromised” and “systematic manipulation of the publication and peer-review process”, after investigations prompted by internal editors and by research-integrity sleuths who raised questions about incoherent text and irrelevant references in thousands of papers.

Wiley is moving to shut down this Hindawi subsidiary, canceling many of the journals and abandoning the name entirely. Meanwhile, the overall problem continues to grow, and threatens to get worse with the introduction of papers that can be written entirely by the new artificial intelligence software.

Much of this problem is tied to our bankrupt academic system, which judges scientists by the number of papers the publish rather than how they teach in the classroom. Thus, research scientists at universities have no motive to teach well. Instead they focus on getting papers in print, even if they have to fake it.

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JAXA identifies cause of Epsilon-S solid-fueled engine failure during test

9:23 am

Japan’s space agency JAXA has now identified the cause of the explosion that destroyed an Epsilon-S solid-fueled engine during a static fire test in July.

The explanation at the link is somewhat unclear, but the bottom line is that the failure was caused “by the melting and scattering of a metal part from the ignition device inside the engine.”

JAXA is working on a fix to prevent the part from melting, but the report provides no timeline on when the next Epsilon launch will occur. Nor do we know when Japan’s larger new rocket, the H3, will launch next as well, having failed during its first launch in the spring. At the moment, Japan is essentially out of the game.

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Russia & China appear to time their secret space operations to American holidays

9:13 am

According to data gathered by the startup LeoLabs, which attempts to track objects in orbit, both Russia and China appear to time their secret space operations to American holidays, likely in the hope fewer eyes are watching at that moment.

The latest evidence happened on Nov. 23, US Thanksgiving, when Russia’s Cosmos 2570 satellite in low Earth orbit (LEO) revealed itself to be a Matryoshka (nesting) doll system — comprising three consecutively smaller birds, performing up-close operations around each other, according to the company. This “spawning” event mimicked the activity of Cosmos 2565, launched on Nov. 30, 2022 and believed to be an electronic reconnaissance satellite, which released a daughter satellite (Cosmos 2566) on Dec. 2, and which, in turn, released its own baby satellite on Dec. 24 (Christmas Eve), according to LeoLabs.

Similarly, on the 25 and 26 of November 2022, LeoLabs said it observed China’s spaceplane, which Beijing calls Test Spacecraft 2, “conduct[ing] rendezvous and proximity operations” that involved a docking maneuver by a satellite it released, Victoria Heath, LeoLabs team lead for communications and marketing, told Breaking Defense. A second docking “likely took place” around Jan. 10, 2023, she said.

In the end it appears this effort only delays observations, at best, but that does give these countries a slight window to do some tests unobserved.

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Stripped screws preventing access to Bennu samples

9:07 am

According to the scientists working to extract the samples from the asteroid Bennu brought back by the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule, the work has been stymied because of two stripped screws.

Last month, researchers at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, discovered that two of the 35 screws that fasten the lid of the sample-return canister couldn’t be opened — blocking access to the remainder of the space rock. Curators used tweezers to pull out what they could, but NASA is now making new screwdrivers so it can get into the equipment it flew billions of kilometres across the Solar System to the asteroid Bennu and back.

Because the capsule is kept within a sealed glovebox to prevent the samples from being contaminated by the Earth environment, removing the screws requires NASA to manufacture special screwdrivers that will also not contaminate that environment. This work is what is causing the delay.

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NASA updates status of three private space stations

8:58 am

NASA today posted a short update of the development status for the three private space stations for which it has signed contracts.

Not surprisingly, Axiom’s station appears to be the most advanced.

Axiom Space, which holds a firm-fixed price, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract with NASA, is on schedule to launch and attach its first module, named Axiom Hab One, to the International Space Station in 2026. A total of four modules are planned for the Axiom Commercial Segment attached to the station. After the space station’s retirement, the Axiom Commercial Segment will separate and become a free-flying commercial destination named Axiom Station.

With the remaining two stations, Starlab and Orbital Reef, the update provided no schedule information. While both Starlab, being built by a consortium led by Voyager Space, and Orbital Reef, being built by a consortium led by Blue Origin, appear to be making progess, the former appears to be accomplishing more than the latter, though that impression could simply be what NASA decided to report. For example, in describing the work being done on Orbital Reef, NASA chose for some reason to say nothing about the testing Sierra Space has been doing to test the inflatible module planned for the station. By leaving that out it makes it appear as if less has been done in developing that station.

These are not the only private space stations being proposed, only the ones that have contracts with NASA. A fourth station, Vast, is being built using funding from private sources, and is partnering with SpaceX.

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