Eartha Kitt – Think I’m Being Had
An evening pause: Performed live on the Dick Cavett Show, 1969. The second half of the clip is Cavett interviewing her about her autobiography Thursday’s Child.
Hat tip Gene Shipp.
Year: 2023
March 3, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Video of lunar impact seen from Hiratsuka Observatory in Japan
They estimate the new crater to be about 65 feet wide.
- Russians Sergey Prokopiev and Dmitry Petelin will today move their seat harnesses into the new Soyuz capsule, while American Frank Rubio will do it on March 6th
I’m not sure why this wasn’t done immediately, by all three, immediately after the arrival of the Soyuz capsule on February 25, 2023. If there had been a major issue the three men would have either had to scramble to make the new Soyuz usable as a lifeboat, or would have been forced to use the improvised lifeboat arrangement in the Dragon Endurance capsule and the leaking Soyuz capsule, despite having a good vessel available.
- A graph showing the steady and slow decay of Hubble’s orbit
The decay was brought up because Hubble now orbits just below SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, and thus some are concerned its work will be hindered by them. I think this is a non-issue. More important is that decay. If Hubble is going to be remain in space, work on a rescue mission must begin soon.
- Chinese satellite inspecting American military satellites in geosynchronous orbit
China has launched a number of these classified inspection satellites, designed to surveil other satellites. As long as they do no harm to others, the satellites are doing nothing wrong, or different than what Russia and the U.S. do.
- Chinese pseudo-company Sepoch now plans first test launch of its stainless steel rocket in 2025
As Jay notes, “Wow stainless steel! Who would of thought of that?”
- Astra identifies the cause of its last launch failure
In reading their conclusions, I came away with the impression that this rocket had a lot of weak links, any one of which could cause a failure. No wonder the company abandoned it after this launch to focus on a new rocket.
Sightseeing in the region near the Starship Mars landing zone
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on November 30, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a bulbous hill in the icy northern lowland plains of Mars. That it is icy here is indicated by the glacier features that appear to fill the small crater near the bottom of the picture.
You can get a better sense of stark alien nature of this terrain by looking at an MRO context camera image of the same area, taken on April 1, 2008. The subject hill is the first hill on the image’s west side, going from the top. This is a flat plain interspersed with crater splats, mounds of a variety of sizes, and a puzzling meandering dark line that suggests a crack from which material is oozing.
The geology to be studied here might be endless but for tourists the views will be astounding in their alienness.
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AGs from 22 states blast Biden’s attempt to illegally insert racial quotas and climate change into federal contracting law
Joe Biden imposes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s
Green New Deal on all federal contractors
In May 2021 President Biden signed an executive order [pdf] requiring federal agencies to make climate change and helping “disadvantaged communities and communities of color” a major priority in all their work.
That executive order, which in many ways was simply a rewording of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s communist and bigoted Green New Deal, required agencies to do things like reconsider where their pension funds were invested and to change those investments — not to get the best return on the dollar as required by law — but to protect them from “the threats of climate-related financial risk.”
The executive order also demanded that the Federal Acquisition Regulatory Council (FARC) require federal contractors to:
…publicly disclose greenhouse gas emissions and climate-related financial risk and to set science-based reduction targets; and (ii) ensure that major Federal agency procurements minimize the risk of climate change, including requiring the social cost of greenhouse gas emissions to be considered in procurement decisions and, where appropriate and feasible, give preference to bids and proposals from suppliers with a lower social cost of greenhouse gas emissions. [emphasis mine]
SpaceX launches another 51 Starlink satellites into orbit
SpaceX today successfully placed another 51 Starlink satellites into orbit, using its Falcon 9 rocket and launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The first stage completed its 12th flight, landing safely on a drone ship in the Pacific. The fairing halves completed their fifth and second flights, respectively.
The 2023 launch race:
15 SpaceX
7 China
3 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India
American private enterprise now leads China 16 to 7, and the entire world combined 16 to 12. SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including other American companies, 15 to 13.
Sunspot update: After going through the roof last month, sunspots drop into the attic this month
With the start of another month NOAA this week updated its graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted that updated graph below, adding some additional details to provide some context.
Last month the number of sunspots rocketed upward to the highest seen since 2014, and only the second time since November 2002 that the Sun was that active. In February those high numbers dropped, though the sunspot activity during the month remained well above the 2020 prediction by NOAA’s panel of solar scientists.
ESA attributes Vega-C launch failure to faulty nozzle from the Ukraine
The European Space Agency (ESA) has concluded that the launch failure of the second stage of Arianespace’s Vega-C rocket on December 20, 2022 was caused by a faulty nozzle produced by a company in the Ukraine.
[T]he Commission confirmed that the cause was an unexpected thermo-mechanical over-erosion of the carbon-carbon (C-C) throat insert of the nozzle, procured by Avio in Ukraine. Additional investigations led to the conclusion that this was likely due to a flaw in the homogeneity of the material.
The anomaly also revealed that the criteria used to accept the C-C throat insert were not sufficient to demonstrate its flightworthiness. The Commission has therefore concluded that this specific C-C material can no longer be used for flight. No weakness in the design of Zefiro 40 has been revealed. Avio is implementing an immediate alternative solution for the Zefiro 40’s nozzle with another C-C material, manufactured by ArianeGroup, already in use for Vega’s Zefiro 23 and Zefiro 9 nozzles.
The press release goes to great length to reassure everyone that these Ukrainian nozzles are still flightworthy, that the fix is merely changing the material used in the nozzle’s throat insert.
JAXA reschedules first H3 rocket launch following investigation
Japan’s space agency JAXA has rescheduled its second attempt to launch its new H3 rocket for March 6, 2023, following the completion of its investigation into the launch abort at T-0 on February 16, 2023.
As a result of the investigation, it is estimated that the first-stage flight controller malfunctioned due to transient fluctuations in the communication and power lines that occurred during electrical separation between the rocket and the ground facilities.
As a result, the solid rocket strap-on boosters did not ignite as planned, and the rocket’s computer, sensing this anomaly, shut down its main engines. The press release says they are installing “countermeasures” but provides no other information.
Endeavour docks with ISS
Endeavour tonight has successfully docked with ISS.
When the spacecraft got within about 70 feet of the station, there was a delay of a little more than an hour while ground controllers installed a software overide to a sensor for monitoring the position of one of the 12 hooks on Endeavour, used to lock it to ISS’s docking port. Though visual and other data showed the hook was working, the sensor could not, and without that software override Endeavour would automatically abort the docking.
This same sensor had caused a delay in the opening of the capsule’s nosecone yesterday shortly after launch.
As of posting the hatch had not yet been opened, something that should occur in about an hour or so. Though Endeavour is docked, more checks needed to be done beforehand.
Srna Kocevska & Alexandra Gjoreska – the Charleston
An evening pause: The dance says the 1920s. It is also amazing how many different moves they do, yet every move belongs to this same dance.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Denial in the post-COVID era
For too many, it is too difficult to enter the Truth booth
The stream of new data about the failures of all the policies imposed on free Americans during the Wuhan panic has become so consistent and repetitive that, to a certain extent, I have become bored reporting it — especially because I have been reporting these facts over and over again since March 2020.
Nonetheless, it is important to do so. When the next new flu-type strain appears, and the power-hungry thugs that run our government try to fear-monger us all to gain power, it will help the general citizenry resist that fear-mongering by having more knowledge.
This essay is also partly inspired by my own doctor, Robert Lending, M.D., who since 2020 has been sending out periodic email updates on the state of the epidemic. From the beginning Lending tried to be as neutral as possible, avoiding any political battles or taking sides. He was not against lockdowns or mask mandates, but he also respected those that opposed them. Thus, he did not insist his patients where masks, especially when they had health reasons to not do so, unlike almost all other doctors. Nor did he ever require the jab to see his patients. His updates simply reported on the research and situation at the time, based on real data.
His most recent update, #107, however was different. It began with this blunt headline: “Should we start renaming COVID-19 to Pfizer-23?” and continued like so:
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A Martian glacier waterfall?
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 25, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a small meandering canyon that appears to drain into a larger side canyon, all part of a region of chaos terrain dubbed Galaxias Chaos in the Martian northern mid-latitudes.
Though the latitude is 35 degrees north, where we should see lots of evidence of glacial features, especially because this is chaos terrain — terrain unique to Mars — that generally appears formed by such processes, I find few outright obvious glacial features in this cropped portion or in the full image.
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