July 7, 2023 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Year: 2023
Self Sufficient Me – 10 Reasons Why NOT to Keep Ducks
An evening pause: Let’s learn something about farming.
Hat tip James Street.
July 7, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Firefly gives sneak peek at its Miranda engine, being developed to replace the Russian engines in Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket
Not much there but an out-of-focus view partly blocked by a workman wearing a t-shirt with the engine’s schematic on its back.
- Blue Origin to launch Iranian satellite?
The article, unfortunately behind a paywall, is about Iran getting an extension from regulators to launch a long delayed communications satellite. Its headline adds “Blue Origin launch in 2024,” which is the real story. As Jay correctly notes, “What on Earth are they talking about? Using Blue Origin to launch an Iranian satellite? Are they out of their minds? Iran is our enemy.” In searching the web, I could only find one hint (which I can no longer find) that Blue Origin offered to do the launch (though it still lacks a rocket to do so), but no indication that any deal with Iran was ever signed.
- China predicts it will reach 70 launches in 2023, a new record
With only 24 launches in the first half of the year, China would almost have to do that number twice over in the second half to meet this target. Since it historically has launched at a much higher pace in November and December, this is not impossible, though still difficult.
- Rumors that Chinese pseudo-company Landspace has financial difficulties
Next week the pseudo-company will attempt for the second time the first orbital launch of a methane-fueled rocket, dubbed Zhuque-2. It sounds like a failure could shut the company down.
- Europe shifting more launches to SpaceX due to Ariane-6 delays
The article lists six payloads that have or will likely switch to the Falcon 9. That’s a lot of money suddenly flowing to SpaceX, from $200 million to $500 million, depending on price per launch. And it is all happening because Europe first denied the importance of reuseability and second moved too slowly in trying to compete. As Jay notes, “SpaceX did not choose to become a monopoly.”
The coming rise of an American royal class, as incompetent and as privileged as all past royalists
A modern Ivy League education: “But Brawndo’s got what plants crave.
It’s got electrolytes!”
The move by the general public away from public schools and universities has become well documented. I have noted this movement in a number of essays, the most recent of which in February showed with ample evidence that these government schools have done such an excellent job of smearing their own reputations so thoroughly that parents and students are fleeing from them in record-breaking and unprecedented numbers.
Similarly, Glenn Reynolds in an essay last week about the recent Supreme Court decision outlawing the use of racial quotas in universities noted this trend as well, and how the Court’s ruling only reinforced the decision by many to avoid these institutions and their routine bigotry.
[W]ho trusts higher education anymore? At the turn of the millennium, when Grutter [a 2003 Supreme Court decision that narrowly allowed university racial quotas] was decided, American higher ed was at its zenith. Since then a series of scandals – just today a famous “ethicist” at Harvard was charged with fraudulent ethics research – has undermined its reputation for probity (and the Hollywood admissions scandal of a few years back certainly undermined the perceived integrity of its admissions process), even as everything else about universities came to seem less serious. With 57 genders, coloring books and crying rooms for election results, endless crusades against “whiteness” and “heterosexism,” and the like, the notion of deferring to the educational seriousness and expertise of those in charge of the asylums of higher ed seemed much less appealing. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make ridiculous. But higher education has supplied the ridiculousness itself.
Both Reynolds and I missed however a much more fundamental point that was then made by one of the commenters to his essay. It isn’t so much that ordinary people are fleeing established universities for other colleges, it is that ordinary people are deciding in increasing numbers to forego a college education entirely, concluding that it is a waste of time. As this commenter noted:
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Puzzling crater on alien Mars
Click for original image.
Today’s cool image once again illustrates that the things that orbiters photograph on the Martian surface are not always what they seem at first glance. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on March 23, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the scientists label as “layering” in this small mile-wide crater.
That layering, seen on both the interior and exterior slopes of its circular rim, is what makes this crater puzzling. It suggests this crater was not formed by an impact, but by volcanism. The layers suggest repeated eruptive events. That the crater sits above the surround plain by about 100 feet strengthens this conclusion.
And yet, a look at the overview map below suggests this conclusion is premature.
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SpaceX launches another 48 Starlink satellites
Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX today successfully launched another 48 Starlink satellites, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The first stage completed its twelfth flight, landing softly on a drone ship in the Pacific. The two fairing halves completed their fourth and seventh flights respectively.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
45 SpaceX
24 China
9 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
In successful launches, American private enterprise now leads China 51 to 24 in the national rankings, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world combined, excluding American companies, 45 to 42.
Taiwan wants and needs Starlink, but local law is blocking a deal
After three years of discussions, negotiations between Taiwan and SpaceX to provide Starlink to that nation broke off in 2022 because of a local Taiwanese law that requires local ownership of at least 51%.
SpaceX would not agree to these conditions, and ended the negotiations. In response, Taiwan has been struggling to get its own communications satellite into orbit, with limited success.
To address that vulnerability, the Taiwan Space Agency (TASA) intends to launch its first self-made low-Earth orbit communication satellite in 2026 and at least one more by 2028, Director General Wu Jong-shinn said. Taiwan also will have rockets capable of carrying payloads weighing over 100 kilograms, he added in an interview.
Since the country doesn’t yet have those rockets, this plan remains dependent on foreign launchers. Moreover, to be effective in low-orbit will require not two satellites but a constellation of 20 to 30. Taiwan is years from being to launch such a constellation.
It seems Taiwan is cutting off its nose to spite its face by not changing this ownership law. Its entire internet access is dependent on 14 undersea cables, and China has already demonstrated the ability to destroy these cables when it cut two in February. No foreign operation is going to give up its ownership to make a deal in Taiwan.
Students complete first suborbital launch from new Nova Scotia spaceport
Students today completed the first suborbital launch from the new Nova Scotia spaceport being run by Maritime Launch Services.
The launch was completed by Arbalest Rocketry, a rocketry team from Ontario’s York University. It in turn is part of a nationwide Canadian student program called Launch Canada involving “over 1000 students nationwide from over 25 universities and colleges.”
Maritime hopes to offer both a launchpad and a rocket to satellite companies. It has deals with rocket startups in both the Ukraine and the United Kingdom, whereby satellite companies can come to Martitime and get full launch services.
Large mass of granite unexpectedly detected on Moon
Using archival data from four lunar orbiters (two American and two Chinese), researchers have unexpectedly detected evidence suggesting the existence of a large 20-mile-wide mass of granite under a lunar volcanic caldera.
“We have discovered extra heat coming out of the ground at a location on the Moon believed to be a long dead volcano which last erupted over 3.5 billion years ago. It’s around 50km across, and the only solution that we can think of which produces that much heat is a large body of granite, a rock which forms when a magma body – the unerupted lava – below a volcano cools. Granite has high concentrations of radioactive elements like uranium and thorium compared to other rocks in the lunar crust, causing the heating we can sense at the lunar surface”.
Except for some small grains found in Apollo lunar samples, granite has not been found anywhere in the solar system except on Earth. This discovery, if confirmed, will strengthen the theory that the Moon was once part of the Earth and was created from the impact of a second large body.
Update on preparations at Boca Chica for next Starship/Superheavy test launch
Link here. The article provides an excellent review of the extensive work SpaceX is doing, especially in repairing and upgrading the Superheavy launch facility.
Overall, SpaceX is moving fast, suggesting that Elon Musk’s prediction that it will be ready technically to launch in August quite believable. I remain doubtful that launch will happen in August, however, as I fully expect the FAA and the Biden administration will not issue a launch license on time, but will delay it.
Isabel Martínez – Capricho árabe
An evening pause: The music written by Francisco Tárrega.
Hat tip Judd Clark.
July 6, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Seattle press goes ga-ga over Blue Origin pr event
The article touts the “thousands of jobs” Blue Origin will bring the city. It seems unaware the company’s accomplishments so far have been remarkably disappointing.
- Another Vega-C engine failure during static fire test
The test was part of the investigation following a failure of an identical engine during a Vega-C December 2022 launch. This new failure was on an engine that had been upgraded, so the European Space Agency has now begun an independent review. Vega-C will thus not resume launches this year.
- At international conference Russia offers other nations participation in its proposed Russian Orbital Station
A diagram of that station can be found here. As Jay quite correctly notes, “China does not want them, we don’t want them, and India signed the Artemis Accords. This new station is made up of leftovers from the ISS and one module that was never launched. Their program has become a side-show.”