September 10, 2024 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: 2024
Sheryl Crow, Eric Clapton, Vince Gill, Albert Lee – Living on Tulsa Time
An evening pause: Performed live 2007.
Hat tip Judd Clark, who notes that at one point he counted “five lead guitarists on stage, besides Sheryl.”
Why would anyone who wants a good college education ever go to Harvard?
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education
Two stories last week proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Harvard is at this moment in time the worst American college in the nation, its faculty and staff clearly having no interest in teaching critical thinking. Instead, they are more focused on suppressing dissenting views while making their prime task indoctrinating students into the Marxist and queer agenda that is divorced from reality but eager to discriminate against whites and Jews.
First the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the College Pulse published their fifth annual College Free Speech Rankings, surveying almost 60,000 students across more than 250 universities. Guess which university ranked at the very bottom of the list, for the second year in a row?
Harvard University retained its position as the lowest-ranked institution for free speech for the second consecutive year. Harvard, Columbia University, New York University all received an “Abysmal” rating for their speech climates. The University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College round out the bottom five. These schools not only have low levels of administrative support for free speech. They also have low levels of student comfort in expressing their views on controversial political topics and a strong bias in favor of allowing liberal speakers on campus over conservative ones.
Next, to prove this ranking was well deserved, it appears that Harvard’s administration has refused to cooperate with the local district attorney and the police in investigating the pro-Hamas rioters who attacked Jewish students during the violence that occurred on campus in October 2023, violence committed in support of the rape, torture, and murder of innocent men, women, and children near Gaza that same month.
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The reasons why Mars two polar caps are so different
The Martian north pole.
The Martian south pole.
What the colors mean in terms of elevation
A new paper, in review for the past year, has now been published describing the differences between the north and south poles of Mars, the most fundamental of which involve the planet’s orbit and the different elevations of the two poles, with the south pole three to six miles higher in altitude (as indicated by the colors on the maps to the right).
The cumulative data has allowed the researchers to explain why — when the thin winter cap of dry ice sublimates away in the spring — the process at the south pole results in spiderlike features that get enhanced from year to year, but in the north pole that sublimation process produces no such permanent features.
In both cases, the spring sunlight passes through the clear winter mantle of dry ice to heat its base. The sublimated trapped CO2 gas builds up, until the pressure causes the mantle to crack at weak spots. In the south that trapped gas flows uphill each spring along the same paths, carving the riverlike tributaries dubbed unofficially as “spiders” and officially as “araneiform terrain.”
Geophysicist Hugh Kieffer described that process in 2006. A few years later, [Candice] Hansen [the new paper’s lead author] followed up with her own model for the north polar cap, which also displays fans in the spring.
She found that the same phenomena occur in the north, but rather than relatively flat terrain, these processes play out across sand dunes. “When the Sun comes up and begins to sublimate the bottom of the ice layer, there are three weak spots – one at the crest of the dune, one at the bottom of the dune where it meets the surface and then the ice itself can crack along the slope,” Hansen said. “No araneiform terrain has been detected in the north because although shallow furrows develop, the wind smooths the sand on the dunes.”
There is also a lot more dust in the north, including a giant sea of dunes that circles the polar cap. In addition, the northern winter is shorter due to the planet’s orbit, and takes place during the annual dust storm season, causing there to be more dust concentrated within the northern ice. All of these factors make the the dunes and general surface in the north is more easily smoothed by the wind.
A cloud atlas of Mars
Click for original image.
Using data obtained from one of the instruments on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Mars Express orbiter, scientists have now published an atlas of the clouds of Mars and made it available to the public.
The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, is just one example of the images in the atlas. From the caption:
This image displays two atmospheric phenomena: the white curved lines are gravity wave clouds, while the brown areas are dust lifted from the ground by wind. The colour shift visible in the dust lifting event might be indicative of very fast winds, a phenomenon currently under investigation by other members of the team.
The atlas contains more than 300 images of various Martian cloud formations, from the one to the right to images of cirrus clouds on the top of Olympus Mons, Mars’ largest volcano. You can download it here (the file is a very large spreadsheet).
FAA delays launch license approval of next Starship/Superheavy test launch until late November
The White House to SpaceX: “Great business you got there! Really be
a shame if something happened to it!”
According to an update today on SpaceX’s Starship webpage, the FAA has told the company to not expect a launch license for its next Starship/Superheavy orbital test launch until late November.
We recently received a launch license date estimate of late November from the FAA, the government agency responsible for licensing Starship flight tests. This is a more than two-month delay to the previously communicated date of mid-September. This delay was not based on a new safety concern, but instead driven by superfluous environmental analysis. The four open environmental issues are illustrative of the difficulties launch companies face in the current regulatory environment for launch and reentry licensing.
This two month delay is actually a four month delay, since SpaceX had previously stated it was ready to launch in early August. » Read more
CEO of the German rocket statup Isar Aerospace pulls a Musk
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
During an interview at a conference this week, Daniel Metzler, the CEO of the German rocket statup Isar Aerospace, imitated the kind of comments issued routinely by Elon Musk prior to one of SpaceX’s daring test launches, stating that the first launch of Isar’s Spectrum rocket will be a success “if we don’t blow up the launch site.”
“For me, the first flight will be a success if we don’t blow up the launch site,” explained Metzler. “That would probably be the thing that would set us back the most in terms of technology and time.” He went on to explain that the company’s “test early and improve iteratively” development approach was inherently risky.
Though no launch date has been set, there are indications based on the activity at the Andoya spaceport in Norway, where Isar has a 20-year lease on the only launchpad, that this launch could occur within the next month or so. Andoya received its spaceport license late last month, and it also appears that Norway’s bureaucracy is not acting to delay this activity, as has the Civil Aviation Authority in the United Kingdom.
In approving Europa Clipper’s launch, NASA and JPL claim its non-spec transistors will “heal” themselves in Jupiter orbit
Europa in true color, taken by Juno September 2022.
Click for full image.
In making the decision to allow Europa Clipper to be launched on a Falcon Heavy on October 10, 2024, NASA and JPL officials explained that after several months of testing, they believe the improperly hardened transistors installed throughout the orbiter will “heal” themselves while in the low radiation portions of its orbit around Jupiter.
[The testing] showed the transistors in question will, in effect, heal themselves during the 20 days between the high radiation doses the probe will receive during each of 49 close flybys of Europa, all of them deep in Jupiter’s powerful magnetic field and radiation environment.
In addition, onboard heaters can be used as needed to raise the temperature of affected transistors, improving the recovery process. “After extensive testing and analysis of the transistors, the Europa Clipper project and I personally have high confidence we can complete the original mission for exploring Europa as planned,” said Jordan Evans, Europa Clipper project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
I hope this analysis is right, though I fear there is a lot of wishful-thinking involved. It could be however that this testing, in combination with what engineers have learned during Juno’s so-far 64 orbits around Jupiter, might have reassured them.
We however will not know for sure until Europa Clipper is on its way and reaches Jupiter in 2030.
Hurricane damages China’s new launch facilities at its coastal Wenchang spaceport
When Typhoon Yagi (what hurricanes are called in the Asian Pacific) made landfall on September 6, 2024, carrying winds as high as 150 miles per hour, it not only caused flooding and power outages, it apparently did significant damage to China’s new launch facilities at its coastal Wenchang spaceport.
The site has two launch towers, one dedicated to servicing the state’s Long March 8 rockets, while the other services both public and private rockets, including a Long March 12 that was due to make its debut launch later this year.
On Saturday, the city’s deputy mayor, Wei Bo, said the typhoon had posed a “serious threat” to facilities and equipment at the commercial space hub but emergency restoration work was being carried out.
As is usual with China’s state-run press, few details were released, including the actual damages, both to the launch facilities and to the nearby cities.
China has been using this spaceport increasingly to support its space station as well as launch planetary probes. It has also developed a commercial launchsite there for its pseudo-private companies to use. How this damage will impact future launches remains unknown.
Jared Isaacman’s private spacewalk manned mission launches on Falcon 9
Early this morning SpaceX successfully launched its Resilience Dragon capsule carrying four passengers on Jared Isaacman’s mission to do the first entirely private spacewalk. The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Resilience is flying its third flight. The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The spacewalk will take place on September 12, 2024. In between the crew will spend the next two days preparing for that, while flying in an orbit with a apogee of 870 miles, the highest any person has flown from Earth since Apollo. That orbit will be lowered slightly for the spacewalk itself.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
89 SpaceX
38 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 104 to 57, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 89 to 72.
Watch the launch of private manned Polaris Dawn
The real rocket behind tonight’s launch
SpaceX tonight will attempt the launch of the private manned Polaris Dawn mission, led and paid for by billionaire Jared Isaacman and carrying three other crew member (including two SpaceX employees).
I have embedded the live stream below, which has already begun. The launch is presently scheduled for 3:38 am (Eastern), with a four hour launch window.
The mission is planned as a five day mission, during which two astronauts will do a tethered spacewalk, though the entire crew will be in EVA spacesuits. This will be the first entirely private spacewalk, involving no government involvment at all. The mission will also attempt reach the highest orbit since the Apollo days, more than 870 miles.
As I wrote the day of the mission’s first launch attempt:
The mission’s real goal however has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with freedom and the American dream. This is an entirely private mission. The rocket is privately built. The capsule is privately built. The launchpad is privately built. The launch crew is privately employed. The astronauts are all private citizens, with one paying the way for the entire flight and two flying as employees of SpaceX to test the operation of its capsule in orbit.
No government money is involved. The government had little or no say on what will happen. The mission will illustrate in very stark terms what the American dream is all about, since it has been conceived, paid for, and created entirely by private citizens following their own dreams and goals.
Hail to freedom! May the bell of liberty always ring.
Naomi SV – The Sounds of Silence
An evening pause: Short but sweet. As she notes, the performance “turns into a Disney movie.”
Hat tip James Street.