Year: 2024

Trump indirectly tells us the swamp WILL be drained if he is re-elected

1:31 pm

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Today I saw a short clip of Donald Trump answering a question about whether he is getting the normal intelligence briefings traditionally given to all presidential candidates. His answer was startling:

Well I could [get them] if I wanted them, but I don’t want them. … They come in, they give you a briefing and then two days later they leak it and then they say you leaked it. The only way to solve that problem is not to take them.

On its face Trump is simply telling us he is now being careful with whom in the government he deals with. On a deeper level, he is showing us that he is no longer the naive businessman he was in 2016. At that time he wanted very much to reform Washington, but he thought he had the good will of the people in Washington to help him do it. (Remember, for most of his life he was a dedicated Democrat with many friends on the left.)

Instead, he found himself stymied and back-stabbed and attacked on all levels. » Read more

40 comments

Chinese scientists find method to extract water from Chang’e-5 lunar samples

12:04 pm

Proposed concept for extracting water from lunar regoilth
Proposed concept for extracting water from
lunar regoilth

Chinese scientists have found that by heating Chang’e-5 lunar samples to 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit it is possible to extract a significant amount of water. From the paper’s abstract:

FeO and Fe2O3 are lunar minerals containing Fe oxides. Hydrogen (H) retained in lunar minerals from the solar wind can be used to produce water. The results of this study reveal that 51–76 mg of H2O can be generated from 1 g of LR [lunar regolith] after melting at temperatures above 1200 K. This amount is ∼10,000 times the naturally occurring hydroxyl (OH) and H2O on the Moon. … Our findings suggest that the hydrogen retained in LR is a significant resource for obtaining H2O on the Moon, which are helpful for establishing scientific research station on the Moon.

A video in Chinese (hat tip BtB’s stringer Jay) that describes this research can be found here. (If any of my readers understands Chinese and can provide a translation of this video’s narration, I would be very grateful.) It includes an artist’s rendering (screen capture to the right) showing how such a system on the Moon could work to extract water from the soil. Sunlight would be focused by a lensed mirror into a glass-domed container, heating the ground. The water would evaporate, condense on the glass and be sucked into a tube that would transfer it to a water tank.

This design is of course very simple and preliminary. According to Jay, “They need to heat the soil to 1000℃ (1832°F) to get the iron oxide in the lunar soil to split, the oxygen combines with hydrogen to make water and iron (melting point of iron is about 1500℃). You will need a nuclear reactor to produce that much power for an inductive furnace to get that hot. Doing the calculation, it would take about 245kw to heat up a metric ton of dirt in one hour to a 1000℃ degrees. It could be done slower over 24 hours at 10kw.”

Despite the technical difficulties getting such equipment operational on the Moon, that this research suggests water can be produced practically anywhere on the lunar surface is signficant. It suggests that even if no easily accessible water ice is found in the permanently shadowed craters at the poles, lunar bases still have viable options for obtaining water, and they don’t have even be at the poles.

8 comments

China launches communications satellite

11:33 am

China today successfully launched a new communications satellite, its Long March 7A rocket lifting off from its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

A short clip showing the launch can be found here. (Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.)

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

83 SpaceX
35 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 98 to 53, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 83 to 68.

0 comments

New port for big cruise ships dropped in Florida because it threatens space operations

10:02 am

A plan to build a new terminal in Port Canaveral for the large cruise lines has now been dropped because the constant arrival and departure of those ships would hinder launches from both Cape Canaveral as well as the Kennedy spacport.

On Aug. 2, Florida Department of Commerce Secretary J. Alex Kelly and Florida Department of Transportation Secretary Jared Perdue expressed dismay about cruise-terminal plan changes that could affect the space industry. Kelly and Perdue, in a letter, said that unless the port returns to earlier plans for the berth, the Department of Transportation will shift investments to other seaports and spaceports, and the Department of Commerce will halt funding for Port Canaveral projects.

These threats were enough to cause the port to drop its plans.

This story strongly suggests that the Florida state government views the future income from spaceport operations to far exceed that of the tourist cruise business, and does not wish the latter to interfere with the former’s growth in any way.

1 comment

Proposed commercial spaceport in Nova Scotia teams up with Voyager Space

9:54 am

The proposed commercial spaceport in Nova Scotia that was first proposed by the company Maritime Launch Services in 2017 has now signed a partnership deal with the space station company Voyager Space.

Voyager, through its Exploration Segment, will provide comprehensive engineering, design and fabrication support to Maritime Launch, leveraging more than six decades of combined aerospace and defense technology experience. Voyager will bring its decades of commercial spaceflight engineering, manufacturing, and operations capabilities to provide engineering design and development and buildup of select portions of the launch site on behalf of Maritime Launch. Voyager will work alongside Maritime Launch to analyze launch client requirements and integrate them into the current site layout.

Maritime’s original plan had been to provide a launch location and rocket (produced by a Ukrainian company). Satellite companies would sign with both for launch services. The invasion of the Ukraine by Russia in 2022 killed that arrangement. So did red tape, as the Canadian government only passed a law allowing spaceports to make deals with international partners at the start of August.

It appears Maritime has realized that without that rocket partner, it needs another experienced partner to help build the spaceport itself and make sure launches by many different rocket companies are done safely. It has now hired Voyager to do this, since that company is leading the Starlab space station consortium that includes many very experienced companies, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Airbus, Mitsubishi, and the European Space Agency.

1 comment

First SLS/Orion manned mission faces new delays because of Orion heat shield issues

9:39 am

Orion's damage heat shield
Damage to Orion heat shield caused during re-entry in 2022,
including “cavities resulting from the loss of large chunks”

Because the damage to the heat shield on the Orion capsule that flew around the Moon in late 2022 remains somewhat unexplained, NASA is considering delaying the next SLS/Orion mission, presently planned for September 2025 and intended to be the first Artemis flight to carry humans and take them around the Moon.

The heat shield, already installed at the base of the Orion spacecraft, will take the brunt of the heating when the capsule blazes through Earth’s atmosphere at the end of the 10-day mission. On the Artemis I test flight in late 2022, NASA sent an Orion spacecraft to the Moon and back without a crew aboard. The only significant blemish on the test flight was a finding that charred chunks of the heat shield unexpectedly stripped away from the capsule during reentry as temperatures increased to nearly 5,000° Fahrenheit (2,760° Celsius).

The spacecraft safely splashed down, and if any astronauts had been aboard, they would have been fine. However, the inspections of the recovered spacecraft showed divots of heat shield material were missing.

Two years later, despite extensive investigation and analysis, it appears NASA has not yet identified the root cause of the damage. The ablative material used on Orion was similar (though not identical) to the material used successfully on numerous other heat shields since the 1960s, yet it did not perform as expected.

NASA is presently facing three options. Do nothing and fly the next mission as planned, with four astronauts. It could rethink the trajectory used during re-entry, though this would likely not change things significantly unless the astronauts don’t go around the Moon as planned. Or it could change the heat shield itself.

The first two options are very risky, considering the unknowns. The latter involves a major delay of at least two years.

A decision must be made soon however. To meet the agency’s schedule it must begin stacking SLS’s two solid-fueled strap-on boosters next month. Those boosters have a limited life expectancy originally estimated to be one year. In the first unmanned Artemis test flight in 2022, NASA because of other delays stretched that life span to two years, and had no problems with the launch. If it stacks the boosters now and then has to delay for two more years to redesign Orion’s heat shield, those boosters will have been stacked for three years when launched.

Considering how seriously NASA is taking the issues with Starliner, which are likely not as serious as a heat shield that doesn’t work reliably, it would seem insane for NASA to launch Orion manned without fixing its own problem. And yet, for more than two decades NASA has consistently not demanded the same safety standards for SLS that it has demanded for the private commercial rocket startups. We shall see if this pattern now persists.

I continue to believe that the first Artemis lunar landing will not take place before 2030 (at least six years behind schedule). This heat shield dilemma only strengthens that prediction.

14 comments

August 21, 2024 Quick space links

4:49 pm

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.

 

 

 

 

5 comments

Pushback: Parent sues Denver school board and four of its board members for slander

2:10 pm

The slanderers on the Denver Board of Education
The accused slanderers still serving on Denver’s Board of Education.
Click for details about each.

Fight! Fight! Fight! Kristen Fry, a parent in Denver, has now sued the four members of the Denver school board who teamed up with a political consultant they worked with to falsely accuse her of assaulting that political consultant at a public board meeting while also using a vicious racial slur against him.

Fry had been part of a group of parents and teachers that were desperately trying to get this board to change its policies in the schools that had were allowing violence to run rampant From Fry’s lawsuit [pdf]

In the period leading up to 2022-23 school year, the BOE [Board of Education] defendants pursued a number of significant changes to DPS [Denver Public Schools] policy that had severe consequences for the educational and safety environment in DPS schools.

Among other things, in an initiative spearheaded by Mr. Anderson, and supported by the other defendants, DPS removed public safety officers from district schools because of purported racial inequities in disciplinary enforcement. DPS further replaced clear behavioral and accountability rules with what are sometimes termed “restorative justice” principles that often have the effect of leaving students (especially low-income students) vulnerable to disruptive and even criminal behavior by their classmates. For example, under the new rules, schools were required to allow potentially violent students, including students facing criminal charges such as robbery and attempted murder, to attend in person, even where against the advice of law enforcement authorities.

These policies were doing nothing but bring chaos and violence to the schools, while seriously degrading the learning environment. The parents, teachers, and even students repeatedly attempted in private and in public to convince the board its policies were not working.

In every case, this effort was met with anger, disrespect, and retailation by the board. In one case the board immediately terminated a principal for expressing dissent about their policies to a television news reporter. In the case of Fry, these thugs not only repeated these false claims against her in many public forums, they teamed up to file criminal charges against her.
» Read more

5 comments

The massive scale of Mars’ biggest canyon

12:24 pm

Overview map

The south rim of Valles Marineris
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 24, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled merely a “terrain sample” by the camera team, it was likely taken not as part of any particular research project, but to fill a gap in the picture-taking schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

When the camera team needs to do this, they try to pick interesting targets within the required timeframe. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes not. In today’s example, they succeeded quite well. As shown by the overview map above, this picture captures (as indicated by the rectangle) the top of the southern rim of Valles Marineris, the biggest canyon on Mars and quite possibly the biggest in the entire solar system.

For scale, the drop from the rim to the low point in this picture is about 9,000 feet. That’s a 1,000 feet more than the drop from the north rim of the Grand Canyon to the canyon bottom at the Colorado River. In Valles Marineris however our descent has barely begun. To get to the bottom of the southern canyon here you still need to drop 15,000 more feet, for a total descent of 24,000 feet, an elevation change similar to most of the mountains in the Himalayas.

Nor are you yet at the bottom. If you climb over the ridge of 18,000-foot-high mountains that bisect Valles Marineris at this point, you can drop down even further, to a depth 31,000 feet below the southern rim.

Mount Everest is just over 29,000 feet high, which means if placed inside Valles Marineris is peak would still sit 2,000 feet below the rim.

The photo itself highlights part of the erosion process that formed Valles Marineris. This is the dry tropics, so no water was involved in shaping this terrain for many eons. Instead, what appear to be flows within the hollows is alluvial fill, material that over time breaks off and rolls downhill, filling the slopes below. Erosion will grind this material into smaller particles, so given enough time it flows almost like sand.

0 comments

Pragyan data confirms theory that the Moon’s surface was once largely covered with molten lava oceans

10:03 am


Vikram as seen by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Click for interactive map. To see the original
image, go here.

Data from India’s Pragyan lunar rover that landed in the high southern latitudes of the Moon in August 2023 has now confirmed the theory that the Moon’s surface was once largely covered with molten lava oceans.

Santosh Vadawale, an X-ray astronomer at the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, and his colleagues analysed radiation data collected by the APXS [one of Pragyan’s instruments], and used this information to identify the elements in the regolith and their relative abundances, which, in turn, revealed the soil’s mineral composition. The team found that all 23 samples comprised mainly ferroan anorthosite, a mineral that is common on the Moon. The results were reported in Nature today.

“It’s sort of what we expected to be there based on orbital data, but the ground truth is always really good to get,” says Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Previous landers obtained similar results. However, the Chandrayaan-3 samples are the first from the subpolar region: previous landers visited equatorial and mid-latitude zones. Together, this suggests that the composition of the regolith is uniform across the Moon’s surface.

These results are no surprise, but they confirm the global nature of the Moon’s early molten history. More important, they demonstrate that India now has the capability to send landers and rovers to other planets that are also capable of doing real research.

0 comments
1 … 68 69 70 71 72 … 191