An evening pause: Performed live 2012. A most eccentric performance.
Hat tip Alec Gimarc, who notes about Brown, “Most notable for a 4-octave voice and performing with a lit device on his head at the time [1969]. … Impressed he is still alive.”
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
Built by Sierra Space, the flight version of LIFE will be used first on the Orbital Reef station, but will also be made available for purchase by others.
This is not a launch license. It provides the company a window for communications on that launch lasting until October 31, 2024.
ULA’s CEO says in the tweet that they need just one more engine for their 2024 launch manifest, which optimistically hopes to launch three times (2 engines for each launch). It took two months for this new engine to arrive after delivery of the last two.
If successful, it is now targeting a September maiden orbital launch, marking a two month delay from previous announcements.
It is at present unclear whether the object was retrieved and then re-released.
The break-up is because of China’s partnership with Russia, and ESA has broken all ties with Russia due to its Ukraine invasion. The article at the link also notes that Turkey has applied to joint China’s moonbase alliance.
This action means 20 shares will suddenly be worth only one, even as the stock price tumbles to under a dollar per share. This company is dying, and Wall Street know it.
He commanded Soyuz 23 in 1976, which because of a failed antenna was unable to dock with Salyut-5 and returned to Earth after only two days in space, crashing through the ice on Lake Tengiz and thus becoming the USSR’s first and only manned splashdown.
Figure 2 from the paper. Click for original.
Using data from the Mars rover Perseverance, scientists have concluded that dust removal rate in Jezero crater is almost ten times greater than where InSight landed in western Elysium Planitia.
The graph, figure 2 from their paper, illustrates that differents starkly. From their abstract:
Dust removal is almost 10 times larger than at InSight’s location: projections indicate that surfaces at Jezero will be periodically partially cleaned. The estimations of the effect of the accumulated dust as a function of time are encouraging for solar-powered missions to regions with similar amounts of dust lifting, which might be determined from orbital data on where dust storms originate, dust devils or their tracks are found, or seasonal albedo changes are noted.
In other words, it might be practical to send solar powered rovers to different places on Mars, if first research was done to see if the conditions there would regularly clear dust from those panels.
This research confirms what had been implied by the different experiences of landers/rovers in different places on Mars. InSight landed near the equator in a region south of the giant shield volcano Elysium Mons. It only survived four years, with steadily lower energy levels, because no wind or dust devil ever cleared the accumulating dust on its solar panels. Spirit meanwhile landed about 1,500 miles southwest of InSight, yet its power levels were still healthy after more than five years of operations, when those operations ended because the rover could no longer move. The rover Opportunity meanwhile on the other side of the planet lasted more than fourteen years. Both rovers relied on solar power, like InSight, but their solar panels kept getting cleared of dust by wind and dust devils.
It is unclear if this wind research has been done for Europe’s Franklin rover, presently scheduled to land in Oxia Planum in 2028. Franklin will rely on solar panels, and though its nominal mission on the surface is only supposed to last seven months, it is always assumed it will continue until the rover fails.
Robert Pratt has now posted a new 30-minute interview with me as part of his Pratt on Texas podcast, discussing a whole range of recent blacklist stories, and their larger context within our sadly presently debased culture.
This is part one of a two part interview, the second half of which Pratt plans to post next week.
That podcast is embedded below. It can also be listened to here.
» Read more
Elon Musk, a target for destruction
The lawfare won’t stop until morale improves! A new lawsuit has been filed against Elon Musk by eight former SpaceX employees, who now accuse him of sexually harassing them by his sometimes pointed tweets on X, calling those tweets “juvenile, grotesque sexual banter.”
The suit also says Musk’s tweets “had the wholly foreseeable and intentional result of encouraging other employees to engage in similar conduct.”
At SpaceX’s Hawthorne offices, the suit claims, company meetings and employees mimicked Musk’s humor. At meetings, the lawsuit alleges, senior engineers called mechanical parts “chodes” and “schlongs.” A camera that was placed on the bottom of a second-stage Falcon rocket was referred to as the “Upskirt Camera,” and a structure used by astronauts to transfer from SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station was called the “Fun Tunnel,” a euphemism for anal sex.
Read the whole article. The complaints are quite hilarious. These employees need to get a life. This is all silly stuff, hardly worth even two nanoseconds of concern.
Unfortunately, these anti-Musk employees do have a life, and it is a very sad one, consumed wholly with destroying Musk, not accomplishing anything worthwhile on their own. These eight former employees are the same ones who were fired after they published an internal letter in SpaceX calling for others in the company to denounce Musk for his tweets. Following their firing they also instigated a National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) suit against Musk, which is presently suspended because SpaceX is claiming the NLRB’s very existence is unconstitutional, and no further action on the complaint will occur until the courts decide on that claim.
This new lawsuit is simply another example of new harassment of Musk by these former employees.
UPDATE: A later update by NASA provided no new information on why the spacewalk was canceled, but did announce a new date for the EVA, June 24th, while adding “The crew members on the station are healthy, and spacesuits are functioning as expected..”
My guess is that one of the astronauts had a personal but minor health issue, that out of privacy concerns NASA cannot reveal.
Original post:
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A spacewalk planned for today was postponed when the two astronauts involved stopped putting on their spacesuits and instead put them aside “due to spacesuit discomfort issue.”
That is all we know at this point. Was the issue a technical problem with the suits? Or was it something related to the astronauts themselves, such as one experienced stomach problems for instance?
No more details are as yet available. The NASA-designed American spacesuits used on spacewalks on ISS are very complicated and prone to technical problems. If that was the cause it could result in a serious delay before the next spacewalk takes place.
FAA has now announced the schedule of public meetings in connection with the new environmental impact statement (EIS) it is doing for SpaceX’s proposed Starship/Superheavy operations at Cape Canaveral.
On June 12 and 13, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will host a series of public scoping meetings to inform the public and answer questions about SpaceX’s proposal to launch Starship from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A). There will also be a virtual meeting on June 17 for those unable to attend in person.
…Among those attending the public hearings will be representative of the Department of the Air Force, the U.S. Space Force, the U.S. Coast Guard, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, Canaveral National Seashore and SpaceX.
FAA officials claim this new EIS is required, after doing one only five years ago, because of major changes in SpaceX’s design of Superheavy. For example, it originally planned to land the rocket on a drone ship. Now it wants to catch it with the arms on the launch tower.
The FAA’s argument for this new EIS might sound plausible at first glance, but these regulations were never intended to require new environmental statements every time a project underwent changes. The goal was to make sure the environment would not be impacted by the work, and the first 2019 EIS achieved that. None of the changes SpaceX is proposing change significantly its impact on the local environment.
Moreover, the FAA has three-quarters of a century of empirical data at Cape Canaveral proving that spaceports help the local environment, not hurt it. We know without doubt that none of SpaceX’s launch plans will do harm. The FAA should get out of the way.
Instead, it is sticking its nose into everything. This new EIS is merely mission creep, government bureaucrats both covering their backsides while creating new work that increases their power and justifies bigger budgets for their existence.
Link here. The article provides a detailed step-by-step review of everything that happened on the fourth Superheavy/Starship orbital test flight on June 6, 2024, as well as describing the changes being applied to Starship and Superheavy due to that flight.
However, the article also included this announcement from the FAA, stating that it will not do its own mishap investigation on that flight.
The FAA assessed the operations of the SpaceX Starship Flight 4 mission. All flight events for both Starship and Super Heavy appear to have occurred within the scope of planned and authorized activities.
While this decision means SpaceX can go ahead with the fifth test launch as soon as it is ready — no longer delayed while it waits for the FAA to retype SpaceX’s investigation and then approve it — it is unclear whether this FAA decision will allow SpaceX to attempt a tower landing of Superheavy, with the tower’s arms catching the rocket.
If the FAA has not yet approved a tower landing, I suspect SpaceX will forgo that attempt on the next launch in order to get it off the ground as soon as possible, even as it pushes the FAA for such an approval for a subsequent launch.
NASA yesterday accidently aired an on-going drill where ground astronauts were simulating a serious medical emergency, causing public alarm because it appeared the emergency was on ISS itself.
The regular scheduled livestream was interrupted at 6:28 p.m. ET by an unidentified speaker — apparently a flight surgeon — liaising with the crew on the ISS on how to deal with a commander suffering from serious compression sickness.
The speaker advises the crew to “check his pulse one more time,” before placing the stricken astronaut inside a suit pumped full of pure oxygen. She says any action would be “best effort treatment” and better than doing nothing. “Unfortunately, the prognosis for Commander is relatively tenuous,” she says.
She says she is “concerned that there are some severe DCS [decompression sickness] hits” and tells the crew to get him in a suit as soon as possible. She mentions that there is a hospital in San Fernando, Spain, with hyperbaric treatment facilities, in an apparent suggestion of ordering an emergency evacuation from the space station.
But after fueling alarm among the space enthusiasts listening, NASA revealed that the scenario wasn’t real — the ISS crew were all safely asleep at the time.
It appears this was a training exercise on the ground. For reasons that have not been explained, the audio somehow got rerouted onto NASA’s public live stream channel, forcing the agency to quickly issue an explanation.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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An evening pause: I posted a different performance of this song by Steward in 2015. The live version below, performed live in 2020, includes a fascinating intro that describes the roots of the song, as well as some spectacular guitar solos.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Armenia, formerly part of the Soviet Union, has now joined the American space alliance by signing the Artemis Accords, becoming the 43rd nation to do so.
This announcement came on the same day Armenia’s prime minister announced that the country was also leaving the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), created after the break-up of the Soviet Union and created from former U.S.S.R. provinces that are now separate nations.
Armenia’s ties with Russia, its long-time sponsor and ally, have grown increasingly strained after Azerbaijan waged a lightning military campaign in September to take the Karabakh region, ending three decades of ethnic Armenian separatist rule there.
Armenian authorities accused Russian peacekeepers who were deployed to Nagorno-Karabakh after a previous round of hostilities in 2020 of failing to stop Azerbaijan’s onslaught. Moscow, which has a military base in Armenia, rejected the accusations, arguing that its troops didn’t have a mandate to intervene.
It could also be that Armenian sees Russia as a hostile power, considering its invasion of the Ukraine. Russia’s failure to win quickly in the Ukraine and the bogged down nature of the war also make this a very good moment to break free from Russia. Putin doesn’t have the resources to invade another neighbor.
The Artemis Accords now includes these nations: Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Bahrain, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Peru, Poland, Romania, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, the United States and Uruguay.
Whether it will do much depends wholly on what the U.S. does. Right now, the American government’s space effort is confused and incoherent. There is a lot of money being spread around, but not much getting accomplished.
