June 12, 2020 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Author: Robert Zimmerman
Interstellar suborbital launch ends in failure
Capitalism in space: A suborbital launch attempt today by Interstellar, a private Japanese smallsat rocket company, failed one minute into flight, with the rocket falling into the sea.
It apparently failed at about 12 kilometers elevation, when it began tumbling. I have embedded the video of the launch below the fold, cued to just before liftoff.
This was their fifth launch attempt. Only the third launch reached their target altitude of 100 kilometers.
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Dozens of scientists forced out because of foreign ties, mostly with China
An investigation by the National Institute of Health (NIH) has resulted in 54 scientists either resigning or being fired because they had illegally kept secret their financial ties to foreign governments, almost all of which were with China.
Some 54 scientists have resigned or been fired as a result of an ongoing investigation by the National Institutes of Health into the failure of NIH grantees to disclose financial ties to foreign governments. In 93% of those cases, the hidden funding came from a Chinese institution.
The new numbers come from Michael Lauer, NIH’s head of extramural research. Lauer had previously provided some information on the scope of NIH’s investigation, which had targeted 189 scientists at 87 institutions. But his presentation today to a senior advisory panel offered by far the most detailed breakout of an effort NIH launched in August 2018 that has roiled the U.S. biomedical community, and resulted in criminal charges against some prominent researchers, including Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard University’s department of chemistry and chemical biology.
“It’s not what we had hoped, and it’s not a fun task,” NIH Director Francis Collins said in characterizing the ongoing investigation. He called the data “sobering.”
The article, from the liberal journal Science, tries to imply that there is something bigoted about this investigation because the bulk of those forced out happened to be Asian, but that is junk journalism. China itself is bigoted, and targets those of Asian ancestry for its spying. If we are to defend our nation from them, we have to accept the fact that the ethnic statistics here will not be balanced.
The bottom line remains: If you want to get an American government research grant, you cannot have financial ties with hostile foreign governments. And if you lie about those ties, than we can safely assume you are an agent for those hostile governments, and are really a spy subject to arrest and prosecution.
Head of NASA’s commercial program picked as chief of manned space
NASA’s administrator Jim Bridenstine yesterday announced that he has chosen Kathy Lueders to be the new head of the agency’s human exploration program.
In her most recent positions at NASA Lueders has been in charge first of the ISS commercial cargo program, followed by the ISS commercial crew program. She now heads the entire manned program, including Artemis.
This appointment appears to be great news for the emerging new commercial space sector (led by SpaceX), as Lueders’ close contact with them for the past half decade or so means she has seen up front the advantages of both competition and private enterprise. I suspect she will not look kindly at the endless delays at SLS and Orion, even if she has to play the political game of publicly appearing to support those projects. Like her predecessor Doug Loverro, she will be open to awarding contracts to whoever can get the job done best, rather than favoring the traditional big space contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as Loverro’s predecessor Bill Gerstenmaier had often done.
NASA’s shift from being the builder of space systems to the buyer of space systems is going to accelerate.
Successful SpaceX launch
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully launched 58 Starlink satellites as well as three Planet earth observation satellites. The image to the right looks up at the exhaust from the nine firing Merlin engines of Falcon 9 rocket, about two minutes after launch.
That first stage also successfully landed, the third time this stage has completed a launch. The fairing halves were also reused.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
11 China
9 SpaceX
7 Russia
3 ULA
The U.S. now leads China 15 to 11 in the national rankings.
Successful Rocket Lab launch
Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today (June 13 in New Zealand) successfully launched five cubesats into orbit using its Electron rocket. The image to the right was taken eleven seconds after liftoff.
This was Rocket Lab’s second launch in 2020, delayed three months due to the Wuhan flu panic that shut down New Zealand. This does not put them in the leader board, but it does change the national rankings. The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
11 China
8 SpaceX
7 Russia
3 ULA
The U.S. now leads China 14 to 11 among the nations. Since SpaceX has its own Starlink launch later tonight, these numbers will likely change again before the night is over.
JJ Cale & Leon Russell – Roll On/No Sweat
An evening pause: Hat tip Cotour.
Chinese military officer arrested trying to leave U.S.
A Chinese military officer who had been participating in research at the University of California in San Francisco under false pretenses was arrested on June 7th as he was trying leave the country with data and information gathered during his stay.
To obtain a visa, Wang allegedly lied about his affiliation with the Chinese military, claiming his service with the People’s Liberation Army had ended in September 2016. In reality, according to the Justice Department, Wang was still associated with the military, which was paying him a stipend while he was in the U.S.
In May, Wang told his supervisor at the university that he was “being recalled to China by his employer, the Fourth Military Medical University, and that he would not return to work at the UCSF lab, thus cutting his fellowship short by approximately one year,” court documents said. Wang also informed his supervisor that he wanted to collaborate remotely from China and that he had already duplicated some of the research conducted at the California laboratory. Court documents said the duplication of research “was previously unbeknownst” to the supervisor in the U.S.
“Wang was instructed by his supervisor in China, the director of the Fourth Military Medical University lab, to observe and document the layout of the lab at UCSF in order to replicate the lab when he returned to China,” the Justice Department said.
The wisdom of the decision by the Trump administration to restrict entry of any Chinese students with ties to the Chinese military is becoming clearer and clearer.
Seattle fire station to become “community center for black residents”
The return of segregation! The Democratically-controlled city of Seattle has decided to bow to demands from a black supremacy group and give that group control over a fire station, making it a “community center for black residents”.
“We at the City of Seattle understand the urgency behind making bold investments in the Black community and increasing community ownership of land in the Central District,” the city wrote. “The City believes in the vision behind the William Grose Center for Cultural Innovation and we remain committed to making the transfer of Fire Station 6 to the community a reality.”
“We have received Africatown’s list of community requests along with a longer list of asks from other black-led organizations. Deputy Mayor Shefali Ranganathan has already met with the King County Equity Now coalition and, on behalf of Mayor Durkan, she will be working with Seattle Department of Neighborhoods and Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development to work on next steps with the community,” it added.
Based on everything I can gather, this new “community center” will be for blacks only. Gee, wasn’t the whole point of the civil rights movement to no longer exclude people based on their skin color?
No matter. This policy of race-based segregation is merely the Democratic party going back to its roots. The only difference is that, unlike in the past when they favored whites and oppressed blacks, they are now favoring blacks and oppressing whites. Seems like a wonderful reason to vote for them, right, Seattle?
Help scientists plan Curiosity’s future travels
The Curiosity science team is asking the help of ordinary citizens in improving the software it uses to plan Curiosity’s future travels.
Using the online tool AI4Mars to label terrain features in pictures downloaded from the Red Planet, you can train an artificial intelligence algorithm to automatically read the landscape.
Is that a big rock to the left? Could it be sand? Or maybe it’s nice, flat bedrock. AI4Mars, which is hosted on the citizen science website Zooniverse, lets you draw boundaries around terrain and choose one of four labels. Those labels are key to sharpening the Martian terrain-classification algorithm called SPOC (Soil Property and Object Classification).
The goal is not to have citizens plan the rover’s route, but to use their judgments to refine the software that the scientists and engineers use to plan the route. This refinement will also be applicable to Perseverance when it gets to Jezero Crater in February 2021.
Isidis Basin, on whose margin Perseverance will roam
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, highlights the floor of one of Mars’ largest basins, dubbed Isidis Planitia, and located at the transition zone between the planet’s northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands.
The overview map below of Isidis Basin provides some context. The white box shows where this particular image is located. Jezero Crater, indicated by the red circle (which is also about the size of the crater), is where the rover Perseverance is going to land and roam come February 2021, should all go well. For scale, Isidis is about the size of the eastern half of the United States. If Chicago was located at Jezero Crater, Baltimore would be on the basin’s eastern edge, at around 4 o’clock.
This particular section of the full photo, taken on April 5, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), shows many features very typical of the floor of Isidis Basin, which also immediately reveal a great deal about its possible history.
In this small snippet we can see what at first glance appear to be pedestal craters standing up like mesas, with ordinary craters scattered about on that lower surrounding terrain. Clearly, if these are pedestal craters they had to have been created first, and then over a very long time erosion processes ate away at that plain, leaving these pedestals (which had become resistant to erosion because the impact had packed their material together and made it harder) behind as mesas.
Then, after this period of erosion was complete enough additional time was required for at least one or two rounds of cratering to occur, leaving behind the many more younger craters on the plain floor, many of which are now partly buried by dust and sand.
The problem is that these mesas are almost certainly not pedestal craters, despite their appearance. » Read more
New analysis of COVID-19 death rate ranks it the same as “a strong seasonal flu”
A new analysis of the COVID-19 death rate has found that it is really no more dangerous than “a strong seasonal flu”, and that it poses little threat to the general population.
Moreover, the analysis finds that
Up to 30% of all additional deaths may have been caused not by Covid19, but by the effects of the lockdown, panic and fear. For example, the treatment of heart attacks and strokes decreased by up to 60% because many patients no longer dared to go to hospital. Even in so-called “Covid19 deaths” it is often not clear whether they died from or with coronavirus (i.e. from underlying diseases) or if they were counted as “presumed cases” and not tested at all. However, official figures usually do not reflect this distinction.
Read it all. There is lots more, all pointing to the unwarranted nature of the panic over the flu, and how that panic likely caused more deaths and damage. Had we reacted more calmly (as had been done for all past similar new such respiratory diseases), the harm to society and number of deaths would have likely been less.