An evening pause: Performed live 1990. Performers include unknowns Glen Campbell, Jerry Reed, & Steve Wariner (guitar); Roy Clark (mandolin), Ray Stevens (piano), Ricky Skaggs (fiddle), Lee Greenwood (saxophone), Steve Gatlin (bass), Barbara Mandrell (steel guitar), and Irlene Mandrell (drums).
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
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.
I originally though this story would be part of my earlier essay today on the hate that links Hamas with the American left, but it simply didn’t fit. Nonetheless, this new revelation is worth posting, just so as to keep the record straight.
Hamas this week quietly adjusted the death toll numbers that it has touted since the war in Gaza began in October 2023, removing thousands of names of women and children. The new numbers prove what many analysts have noted repeatedly, that the death statistics Hamas has been releasing were fabricated lies designed to take advantage their willing allies in the mainstream leftist propaganda press to garner sympathy for this terrorist organization worldwide.
Hamas quietly removed the names of thousands of Palestinians it had previously alleged were killed during the Israel-Hamas war, Salo Aizenberg, from the US-based non-profit organisation Honest Reporting told The Telegraph on Tuesday after analyzing Hamas’s March 2025 casualty update.
Hamas has previously claimed that 70% of casualties have been women and children, a claim no longer reflected in their recently updated lists, according to the research. Approximately 72% of fatalities between the ages of 13-55 are men – the demographic category aligns with Hamas combatants. “Hamas’s new March 2025 fatality list quietly drops 3,400 fully ‘identified’ deaths listed in its August and October 2024 reports – including 1,080 children. These ‘deaths’ never happened. The numbers were falsified – again,” Aizenberg asserted.
The only genocide going on in Gaza right now is being committed by Hamas. It has to go, or there will never be any chance for peace there.
Actions taken this week by both the terrorist group Hamas in Gaza as well as the leftist terrorists in the United States has once again illustrated how little difference there is between these two groups.
The obvious reasons why killing the leaders
of Hamas and Hezbollah is a good thing.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.
In Gaza, Hamas responded to the public demonstrations against it by ordinary Gazans last week by torturing and killing one of the demonstration leaders.
Hamas operatives kidnapped, tortured and executed a 22-year-old Palestinian man who participated in last week’s wave of protests against the terror group, according to his family. Oday Nasser Al Rabay’s body was left in front of his family’s home over the weekend. On Saturday, many dozens were filmed participating in his funeral procession, shouting, “Hamas out!”
Hamas has reportedly been threatening Palestinians who participate in the protests against the terror group, but this appears to be the first time that anyone has been killed in connection to them.
Hamas, which is strongly supported by many politicians in the Democratic Party, has thus illustrated its unwavering intolerance of any opposition, an intolerance so strong that torture and murder is considered a viable option for maintaining power.
Driving that intolerance however is not simply a lust for power, but a hate that fuels Hamas’s every action. The members of Hamas hate all non-Muslims, especially Jews, and want to kill them all. Anyone that stands in the way of this goal thus earns death as well.
Hate allows for this kind of evil. It has to be fed somehow, and if murder is the food, than so be it.
What does this have to do with the American left? » Read more
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 27, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the terraced layers descending down a 7,000-foot-high ridgeline within Hebes Chasma, one of several enclosed chasms that are found to the north of Mars’s largest canyon system, Valles Marineris.
The white dot on the overview map above marks this location, inside Hebes. The rectangle in the inset indicates the area covered by the picture, which only covers the lower 5,000 feet of this ridge’s southern flank.
The ridgeline might be 7,000 feet high and sixteen miles long, but it is dwarfed by the scale of the chasm within which it sits. From the rim to the floor of Hebes is a 23,000 foot drop, comparable to the general heights of the Himalaya Mountains. Furthermore, this ridge is not the highest peak within Hebes. To the west is the much larger mesa dubbed Hebes Mensa, 11,000 feet high and 55 miles long.
The terraces indicate the cyclical and complex geological history of Mars. Each probably represents a major volcanic eruption, laying down a new bed of flood lava. With time, something caused Hebes Chasm to get excavated, exposing this ridge and these layers.
The excavation process itself remains unclear. Some scientists think the entire Valles Marineris canyon was created by catastrophic floods of liquid water. Others posit the possibility of underground ice aquifers that sublimated away, causing the surface to sink, eroded further by wind. Neither theory is proven, though the former is generally favored by scientists.
If you believe this I have a bridge I can sell you cheap: According to Turkey’s state-run press, the Turkish Space Agency is now researching locations for its own spaceport, either in Turkey or in some other nearby nation such as Somalia.
According to information provided by relevant government agencies, efforts are ongoing to select a suitable location for the facility. Discussions are underway with countries near the equator, including Somalia, to maximize launch efficiency.
…Once operational, the spaceport will support independent satellite launches, marking a major step in Türkiye’s ability to access space without relying on foreign platforms.
Recently Turkey launched its first home-built smallsat on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It seems its space agency now believes it can quickly whip up its own rocket and launch it from a quickly built spaceport, likely in another country.
This announcement is nothing but government blather published to puff up these government officials so that they can garner more funding and build bigger more palatial offices.
According to Iran’s state-run press, the government is about to begin the next construction phase for its proposed new coastal spaceport near the city of Chabahar.
The head of the Iranian Space Agency has announced that the second phase of the Chabahar spaceport for semi-heavy liquid-fueled launchers is to be inaugurated in the current Persian calendar year. Hassan Salarieh said on Tuesday that the first phase of the Chabahar spaceport is for solid fuel launchers and is expected to be inaugurated this year (which started March 21), adding that adequate studies were conducted regarding the second phase of the site in previous years and the new phase for semi-heavy liquid fuel launchers is to be opened during the year.
The details are very vaguely words. Will launches of solid-fueled rockets begin this year, or construction? Earlier reports had promised the first launch from Chabahar would occur in March 2025. That clearly has not occurred.
This spaceport will supplement Iran’s older Semnan launch facility in the country’s interior, from which all previous Iranian launches have occurred.
The launch of the first 27 satellites in Amazon’s 3,200-plus satellite Kuiper internet constellation has now been scheduled for April 9, 2025, using ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The Kuiper constellation, intended to compete directly with SpaceX’s Starlink constellation, was first conceived at about the same time as Starlink. Since then — while Amazon moved slowly launching only two test satellites — SpaceX launched thousands and signed up millions of customers, grabbing market share that it will be difficult for Kuiper to re-capture.
The launch will also be the first in 2025 for ULA, which had hoped to do as many as 25 launches this year with its old soon-to-be-retired Atlas-5 and new Vulcan rocket. The six-month delay in getting the Pentagon to finally certify Vulcan for commercial military launches has put a damper on that plan. Right now ULA will be lucky if it can complete half those launches.
Asteroid 2024 YR4 as seen by Webb in the
mid-infrared. Click for original image.
Using new infrared images and data from the Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have further refined the orbit and size of the potentially dangerous asteroid 2024 YR4.
The image of 2024 YR4 to the right was taken by Webb’s mid-infrared camera, and provides information on its thermal surface characteristics.
First, the Webb data narrowed the uncertainty about the asteroid’s size, suggesting it is about 200 feet in diameter. You can read the paper outlining this result here. The data also suggested nature of the asteroid’s surface, which is important in determining its future path. The pressure from sunlight can change the orbits of small asteroids, but figuring out how much is extremely difficult without knowing the rotation of the asteroid and the reflective qualities of its entire surface.
Second, based on this new data, other astronomers are increasingly certain 2024 YR4 will not hit the Earth in 2032, but the odds of it impacting the Moon have now increased to 4%.
In the past day the crew of the private Fram2 manned orbital spaceflight have released several updates, describing their initial experience in weightlessness as well as releasing some images of themselves inside the Resilience capsule.
First, on April 1, 2025 the mission commander, Chun Wang, the billionaire who paid for the flight, posted a tweet describing how all four crew members experienced space sickness the first day in orbit.
The first few hours in microgravity weren’t exactly comfortable. Space motion sickness hit all of us—we felt nauseous and ended up vomiting a couple of times. It felt different from motion sickness in a car or at sea. You could still read on your iPad without making it worse. But even a small sip of water could upset your stomach and trigger vomiting.
Things however quickly settled down, allowing them to open the nose cone so that they could see out the large cupola window. They released the first images of the Antarctic, and followed soon after with the first images of themselves inside Resilience. The picture to the right, taken by Wang, shows is three crewmates, Jannicke Mikkelsen, Rabea Rogge, and Eric Philips clearly now enjoying the experience of weightlessness.
Still no word on a return date. The mission was initially supposed to last 3 to 5 days. We are now on day three, with no indications of a planned return date.
After months of delays, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation yesterday finally announced it has scheduled for April 9, 2025 the confirmation hearing for Jared Isaacman’s nomination as NASA administrator.
I have previously speculated that the delay in scheduling this hearing was because there was opposition to Isaacman among Republicans both in the Senate and inside the White House, based on his past donations to the Democratic Party as well his previously strong support for Divesity, Equity, and Inclusion in his companies. It appears Isaacman must have eased those concerns when he began face-to-face private meetings with several Senate Republicans in the last two weeks, thus allowing the hearing to be scheduled.
Isaacman has been in Washington in recent days for one-on-one meetings with senators, a standard part of the confirmation process before a formal hearing. That included Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas), who chairs the committee’s subcommittee on aviation, space and innovation, as well as the Senate Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on commerce, justice and science, which funds NASA.
Moran said in an April 1 social media post that he met with Isaacman and discussed topics such as exploration and “a shared desire to beat our adversaries back to the Moon” as well as work on science and technology at NASA. “I am eager for the Commerce Committee to quickly conduct a confirmation hearing on his nomination to lead NASA,” Moran stated.
It now appears likely that this opposition is dissolving, and that Isaacman’s confirmation is likely.
China today successfully launched a technology satellite designed to calibrate “ground-based radar equipment”, its Long March 6 rocket lifting off from its Taiyuan spaceport in northern China.
No word on where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
37 SpaceX (with another Starlink launch later today)
18 China
5 Rocket Lab
4 Russia
SpaceX now leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 37 to 31.
