Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
At the link is a commercial for this “jewelry,” showing the rocket debris as found in the desert. As Jay notes, “Why go out to the desert? They deliver first stages right to your neighborhood!”
Weather scrubbed the previous launch attempt. The live stream can be found here.
Law professor Scott Gerber
They’re coming for you next: In an ugly act of outright thuggery, Ohio Northern University (ONU) recently fired tenured law professor Scott Gerber, without any standard due process as required by its own procedures, and did so by having the campus police arrive unannouced in his classroom to escort him off campus.
As Gerber recounts, “Around 1 p.m on Friday, April 14, Ohio Northern University campus security officers entered my classroom with my students present and escorted me to the dean’s office. Armed town police followed me down the hall. My students appeared shocked and frightened. I know I was.”
Gerber was not given any concrete reasons after being told that he was being banned from campus, other than his lack of “collegiality.” He was directed to sign a separation agreement.
The reason for Gerber’s firing however appears quite obvious if you want to look. The university did not like his uncompromising and public opposition to ONU’s racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies, which focus solely on favoring minorities in hiring and admissions while working to eliminate and remove any opposition to those racist policies. As he wrote in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal:
» Read more
Click for interactive map.
The panorama above, cropped, reduced, sharpened, and annotated to post here, was created on September 6, 2023 from eleven pictures taken by the right navigation camera on the Mars rover Curiosity.
This mosaic looks south, into the slot canyon dubbed Gediz Valles. The red dotted line on the panorama as well as the overview map to the right indicates the planned route the science team plans on traveling as it sends Curiosity higher and higher on Mount Sharp. On the overview map Curiosity’s present position is indicated by the blue dot. The yellow lines show the approximate area covered by the panorama above.
As noted in today’s update from the science team:
The rover is currently driving across bumpy terrain consisting of rounded bedrock sticking up between dark sand and drift as she drives south, and slightly uphill, along the Mt. Sharp Ascent Route. Due to the rugged ground, the rover sometimes ends her drive with a wheel or two perched on a rock.
When the rover’s placement prevents use of the arm, the scientists have it do other things, such as take more images of the many layers on Kukenan.
As rocky as this future route is, it appears it is less rocky than earlier terrain, which the science team found impossible to traverse requiring several route detours. Thus, the pace forward has been a bit faster lately.
The FAA today closed out its own investigation into the April test launch failure of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, stating that it found “63 corrective actions SpaceX must take” before another launch license will be issued.
Corrective actions include redesigns of vehicle hardware to prevent leaks and fires, redesign of the launch pad to increase its robustness, incorporation of additional reviews in the design process, additional analysis and testing of safety critical systems and components including the Autonomous Flight Safety System, and the application of additional change control practices.
It is not clear how many of these corrections have already been completed by SpaceX. The FAA made it clear however that it does not yet consider its requirements to have been met.
The closure of the mishap investigation does not signal an immediate resumption of Starship launches at Boca Chica. SpaceX must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and apply for and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety, environmental and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next Starship launch.
The timeline suggests FAA is demanding additional actions from SpaceX. The company submitted its own investigation report to the FAA on August 16th. The FAA then spent almost a month reviewing it, during which it almost certainly decided some of SpaceX’s corrections were insufficient. It has now followed up with its own report, listing additional actions required.
Remember, no one at the FAA is qualified or even in a position to do a real investigation. They are simply acting as a chess kibitzer on the sidelines, making annoying commentary based on less information than held by the players of the game (in this case SpaceX). Unlike a chess kibitzer, however, the FAA controls the board, and can force SpaceX to do its recommended moves, or declare the game forfeited by SpaceX.
If the FAA has required additional actions, we will find out in the next few days when SpaceX destacks Starship/Superheavy and rolls both back into the assembly building. It is also possible we instead shall have a few weeks of back-and-forth negotiations by phone, zoom, paper, and face-to-face meetings, whereby SpaceX engineers will be desperately trying to make FAA paper-pushers understand some of their engineering work which will eventually result in an agreement by the FAA to let SpaceX launch.
Remember, none of this kind of regulatory interference and investigation took place between SpaceX and the FAA during the Trump administration when SpaceX was flying a Starship suborbital test flight almost monthly. The heavy boot of regulation arrived soon after Biden. The two are closely linked.
In a new report [pdf] released yesterday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) strongly blasted NASA’s non-budgeting process for financing the costs for this SLS rocket, which appear specifically designed to allow those costs to rise uncontrollably.
This one sentence from the report says it all:
NASA does not plan to measure production costs to monitor the affordability of the SLS program.
That non-plan is actually in direct defiance of four different reports by both the GAO and NASA’s inspector general over the past decade, all of which found that NASA was not using standard budgeting practices with SLS and which all demanded it do so forthwith. As this new report notes in reviewing this history, in every case NASA failed to follow these recommendations, and instead created budgetary methods designed to instead obscure the program’s cost.
This report notes that NASA continues to do so.
» Read more
The FCC, now controlled by the
power-hungry Democratic Party
Failure theater: The Senate yesterday voted 55 to 43 to approve Biden’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC) nominee, Anna Gomez, thus giving the Democrats a 4 to 3 majority on the Commission.
This was Biden’s second nominee to the commission, with the first withdrawn when it was clear the Senate opposed the nominee.
Biden tried again in May with the nomination of Gomez, a State Department digital policy official who was previously deputy assistant secretary at the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) from 2009 to 2023. A lawyer, Gomez was vice president of government affairs at Sprint Nextel from 2006 to 2009 and before that spent about 12 years at the FCC in several roles.
Gomez got through the confirmation process with relative ease, though most Republicans voted against her. Both parties seem to expect the FCC to reinstate net neutrality rules now that Democrats will have a majority.
Imposing net neutrality is essentially socialism/communism for the internet. It will squash competition, cost a fortune, and eventually be used as well to squelch dissent online (which translates into silencing conservatives).
From the perspective of space, the majority on the FCC is likely very bad news as well, for several reasons. » Read more
An evening pause: This is long, but if you like popular music, of all kinds, you will find it worth the watching. To paraphrase one comedian, you will never hear these songs (or most other pop songs) the same way again.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
The deal says it involves investment from the Japanese company, Sumitomo Corporation, but no amounts are given. It does allow Sumitomo to represent Spin Launch in any deals in Japan.
Its solar panels have deployed and the first data has now been received on the ground.
One image shows several instruments on the spacecraft, and the other shows the Earth with the Moon in the background. Both demonstrate that the solar observatory is functioning properly as it works its way toward the L1 point a million miles from Earth and closer to the Sun.
A federal district court judge ruled last week that a lawsuit by seven former health employees in Maine can continue, dismissing the absurd argument by Maine’s Democrat governor, Janet Mills, that even though these employees were illegally denied a religious exemption and got fired for not getting the COVID jab, the harm they have endured no longer exists because Mills eventually stopped enforcing her mandate and will repeal it later this month.
The lawsuit in question — Alicia Lowe, et al., v. Janet Mills, et al. — alleges that the State of Maine violated healthcare workers’ First Amendment rights by refusing to allow a religious exemption to the vaccine mandate. The healthcare workers argue that healthcare facilities should have offered reasonable accommodations for employees who objected to the COVID-19 shots for religious reasons.
Because of Mills’ vaccine mandate, which specifically barred any religious exemption, healthcare facilities were unable to offer a testing option for employees. As a result of this, several healthcare workers were fired after requesting a religious exemption to the mandate. Some of those workers have now filed a lawsuit against both members of the state government and their employers.
You can read the judge’s ruling here [pdf]. » Read more
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 7, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what planetary scientists label somewhat vaguely as “layered deposits,” because though the features inside both of these craters strongly resemble glacial ice features, until this is confirmed a good scientist remains skeptical.
I can be more bold, and call the layers glacial in both of these small and very shallow craters (less than a 100 feet deep). To explain this it is important to understand that the lighting and shadows make it hard to distinguish the high points of these layers. Based on the elevation data from MRO, the ground descends to the south, and the mesa in the southern half of each crater’s floor is actually far below the layers and material to the north.
This elevation data suggests that the layered material is surviving best against the crater’s northern interior wall, which at this latitude, about 36 degrees south, will be in shadow the most.
» Read more
Click for interactive map
On September 3, 2023 Ingenuity successfully completed its 57th flight on Mars, traveling 713 feet for two minutes and nine seconds. As noted at the tweet at the link, the helicopter has now accumulated more than 100 minutes of flight time.
As it has on almost all its recent flights, the helicopter flew a slightly longer distance for slightly longer that its flight plan, probably because it was taking time to find a safe landing spot.
The green dot on the overview map above shows Ingenuity’s new location. It has moved west and north of Perseverance, following the rover’s planned route as indicated by the red dotted line. The blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area of the mosaic below, just released by the Perseverance science team, taken on July 8, 2023 by the rover’s high resolution camera and cropped and reduced to post here. It shows us the rover’s eventual path forward, into that mountain gap.
Click for original, full resolution image (a large file).
The MOXIE instrument on the rover Perseverance in Jezero Crater on Mars has completed its sixteenth and last operational run, once again demonstrating that oxygen can be extracted from the Martian atmosphere in sufficient quantities to supply a future colony of humans.
Since Perseverance landed on Mars in 2021, MOXIE has generated a total of 122 grams of oxygen – about what a small dog breathes in 10 hours. At its most efficient, MOXIE was able to produce 12 grams of oxygen an hour – twice as much as NASA’s original goals for the instrument – at 98% purity or better. On its 16th run, on Aug. 7, the instrument made 9.8 grams of oxygen. MOXIE successfully completed all of its technical requirements and was operated at a variety of conditions throughout a full Mars year, allowing the instrument’s developers to learn a great deal about the technology.
Future MOXIEs will likely be larger in scale, even more efficient, and include methods for liquifying and storing any oxygen produced, though for producing a breathable atmosphere for Martian colonists all that would be needed would be an enclosed habitat. An operating MOXIE-type oxygen generator could fill it.
