Judy Garland – Old Man River
An evening pause: From the first episode of The Judy Garland Show, taped in June 1964 and aired December 1964.
Hat tip Doug Johnson.
Year: 2025
Maybe the only way to reform academia is to shut it down and start over
NC State: Maybe it’s rotten to the core
Back in 2021, when I was reporting new blacklist stories every single day during the intolerant madness after the COVID panic and the death of George Floyd, I posted the blacklisting and attempted destruction of a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, merely because Stephen Porter had publicly questioned the wisdom and soundness of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.
Though administrators tried hard to push Porter out, he managed to survive, and is still teaching at NC State. Sadly however his attempt for justice failed, his lawsuit against this harassment and slander campaign eventually being dismissed by the courts.
Porter however decided he couldn’t simply close the book on the matter. For example, the leftist effort at NC State to silence all debate during this same time resulted in one university employee committing suicide. He couldn’t take the constant harassment, the doxxing of his home address, the vandalism at his home, and the slanders accusing him of being a racist and “white supremacist” wherever he went on campus, all based on no evidence at all.
Moreover, even though the board of governors of the North Carolina university system in 2023 established an “institutional neutrality” policy that forbid its colleges from requiring new students or faculty to endorse DEI or compel them to obey the pronoun demands of others, Porter kept finding NC State violating that policy, in word and deed.
He decided that he needed to fight back.
» Read more
China and SpaceX complete launches
Both China and SpaceX successfully completed launches today.
First, China completed the first launch of its Long March 8A rocket, an upgraded and more powerful version of its Long March 8 rocket. The rocket lifted off from China’s coastal Wencheng spaceport, and put the second batch (number unrevealed) of one of China’s new mega internet constellations.
Along with the basic Long March-8 model and the booster-free tandem configuration, it forms the Long March 8 series of rockets, providing a payload capacity range of 3 tons, 5 tons, and 7 tons to SSO. This significantly enhances China’s satellite networking capabilities for low and medium Earth orbits.
These rockets and the coastal spaceport will also allow China to steadily reduce its reliance on its older family of rockets that use toxic hypergolic fuels and launch from within China.
Next SpaceX launched another 21 Starliink satellites, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 18th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The 2025 launch race:
19 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
Astronomers catalog large ring systems surrounding 74 stars
Click for original image.
Using a variety of ground-based telescopes in many wavelengths, astronomers have now produced a detailed catalog of 74 stars with large dust rings similar to the Oort cloud that is believed to exist at the very outer fringes of our own solar system.
The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows all 74 stars.
The new gallery shows a remarkable diversity of structure in the belts. Some are narrow rings, while others are wider and could be categorized more as “disks” than “belts”. Moreover, some of the 74 exocomet systems have multiple rings or disks and some of those are “eccentric,” meaning not a circular orbit but more like an oval. This provides evidence that yet undetectable planets or perhaps moons are present and their gravity affects the distribution of pebbles in these systems.
You can read the paper here [pdf].
The press release implies the discovery of “exocomets” but that is not true. The belts and rings mapped are likely to have comets in them, but no such comets have been found.
The scientists say that this database can be used to better understand the formation of solar systems, though they also admit that the “limited (although much improved) size of our sample” makes any conclusions based on it very uncertain. They hope however that over time that sample size will grow.
A Pakistani rover will fly on China’s Chang’e-8 mission to the Moon
Pakistan and China have finalized plans to place a Pakistani rover on China’s Chang’e-8 lunar lander mission.
This rover partnership was first announced in November 2024. This new release appears to provide a bit more information about the rover itself.
The rover will have a mass of around 35 kilograms and carry science payloads for studying lunar soil composition, radiation levels, plasma properties and testing new technologies for sustainable human presence on the Moon. It will also feature a collaborative scientific payload developed by Chinese and European researchers.
The Chang’e-8 mission is targeting a 2030 launch and will land in the Moon’s south pole region. China also claims it will initiate construction of China’s International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), but that’s a bit of hyperbole. All it shall be is another unmanned lander with two rovers and other instruments, hardly a manned base. What will matter will be what follows, and how quickly.
Blue Ghost leaves Earth orbit
Artist rending of Blue Ghost on the Moon
Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander has successfully completed the mid-course correction engine burn that has taken it out of Earth orbit and into a transfer orbit to the Moon.
After a successful Trans Lunar Injection burn on Saturday, Feb. 8, Firefly’s spacecraft carrying NASA science and tech to the Moon has departed Earth’s orbit and begun its four-day transit to the Moon’s orbit. Blue Ghost will then spend approximately 16 days in lunar orbit before beginning its descent operations. Since launching more than three weeks ago, Blue Ghost has performed dozens of health tests generating 13 gigabytes of data. All 10 NASA payloads onboard are currently healthy and ready for surface operations on the Moon.
I post the artist’s rendering of Blue Ghost to the right to contrast its design with Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander that fell over when it landed last year. Note how much lower to the ground Blue Ghost is. This will certainly reduce the chances it will have the same problem as Odysseus, even if one leg breaks upon landing.
February 10, 2025 Quick space links
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.
- Industry analysis says that SpaceX generated $8.2 billion in revenue from its Starlink constellation
That includes an estimated $2 billion from the Starshield military subconstellation. This is more than enough to make government funding for developing and flying missions on Starship/Superheavy completely irrelevant.
- MDA wins contract to build Globalstar’s next communications satellite constellation
The contract is listed as worth about $1.1 billion. Apparently, there is plenty of business for more than a few satellite constellations.
- NASA cubesat discovers two new temporary high-energy particle belts circling Earth
The story is more dramatic. The cubesat had apparently failed in April 2024, but then mysteriously came back to life in June 2024, allowing it to make these measurements.
- Boom confirms its first supersonic flight of its XB-1 successfully broke the sound barrier three times, with no audible sonic boom
This achievement makes possible commercial passenger supersonic flights worldwide, even over land. Expect production on Boom’s full size Overture plane to begin very soon.
SpaceX launches another batch of Starlink satellites
SpaceX today successfully launched 22 or 23 Starlink satellites (the reports vary), its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
The first stage completed its 23rd flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. At present one other SpaceX booster has flown more, 25 times.
The 2025 launch race:
18 SpaceX
6 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
Cliff Richard – We Don’t Talk Anymore
An evening pause: Performed live 1979.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
A pimple on Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on November 1, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was likely not taken as part of any specific research project, but to fill a gap in the camera’s schedule in order to maintain its proper temperature. When the camera team does this they try to pick something interesting, and sometimes succeed.
I think they succeeded in this case. At first glance this appears to be a crater, but on closer inspection it is instead a small mound. The picture was taken in the winter, at the high latitude of 55 degrees north. The featureless white surface surrounding this dark mound is almost certainly the mantle of dry ice that falls as snow and covers the poles during the winter. If not that, it is then likely to be a water ice sheet that orbital data suggests covers much of Mars’ high latitudes.
» Read more
It won’t be Democratic Party stupidity that will give Republicans victories in ’26 and ’28
Democrats in Washington
In the past few weeks there have been a number of very entertaining essays describing the insane inability of Democrats to learn anything from their defeats in the 2024 elections. From the second link:
The Democratic Party just can’t help itself. For its own psychological reasons, it can’t move beyond the “denial” stage of grief. Doing so would jeopardize the party’s sense of purpose, identity, and ego. Right now, the “patient” cannot heal itself because it won’t accept the diagnosis.
Instead, it rejects it: Trump is Hitler! Musk is Hitler! MAGA is Hitler! I’m the only one defending democracy!
A sane, rational actor would take a step back and consider his own role in losing three branches of government, a majority of statehouses, and two-thirds of the Supreme Court. And then they’d develop a better product.
Fortunately for the GOP, they’re just not ready for that level of introspection. Not yet. (And probably not until it’s forced upon them.)
And so, the losing losers of the Democratic Party continue to lose. They can’t even counterpunch effectively, because they overreact to every feint. They’re so ridiculously undisciplined, they’re chasing shadows, following the champ around the ring like a puppy dog — eating a buffet of rights, jabs, and uppercuts. [emphasis in original]
All true, but if conservatives think this stupidity on the left will win Republicans the mid-term elections in ’26 and the next presidential election in ’28, they are fooling themselves. » Read more
The payloads on Intuitive Machines Athena lunar lander, including a hopper and a rover
Click for NASA’s original image.
Link here. Athena is scheduled for launch on February 26, 2025 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The article is mostly focused on describing the Gracie hopper, which will attempt to hop into the permanent shadows inside a nearby crater.
Though no announcement has ever been made, it appears the landing site for this lander has been changed. Previously it had been targeting a ridge adjacent to Shackleton Crater, at the south pole and shown on the map to the right. That location however required a launch in January. The delay to February seems to have shifted the landing site.
If all goes to plan, Athena will land on a plateau just 100 miles (160 kilometers) from the moon’s south pole. This region is thought to be rich in water ice, and IM-2 will prospect for the precious resource with the help of some ride-along robots, including a pioneering hopper nicknamed Gracie.
Though I cannot find any specific information on where this location is, I strongly suspect it is the site that Intuitive Machines’ lander, Nova-C (also dubbed Odysseus), attempted to reach last year.
The yellow boxes on the map indicate NASA’s candidate landing zones for its Artemis-3 manned mission.