Focus – Hocus Pocus
An evening pause: Performed live on The Midnight Special October 5th 1973.
Hat tip Alex Gimarc.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
July 3, 2024 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.
- The stock value of South Korean rocket startup Innospace tumbles on first day of public trading
The company has done one suborbital test launch in Brazil, and hopes to do an orbital test launch in the first half of 2025.
- Radar images of two asteroids during close fly-by of Earth
One zipped past on June 27th at a distance of 4.1 million miles, and the second on June 29th at a distance of 184,000 miles.
- New drone video looking down at Tianlong-3’s unplanned launch during static fire test
The footage suggests an engine explosion might have broken the clamps holding the stage in place.
- On this day in 1989 Voyager-2 sent back an image of Neptune and its moon Triton
It was still 47 million miles from Neptune, with the closest approach of 3,000 miles to occur in two months, on August 25, 1989.
Pushback: Jury awards former BlueCross researcher almost $700K for firing her vindicatively for not getting the jab
…and now paying for it.
Bring a gun to a knife fight: A jury has now awarded Tanja Benton, a former BlueCross research scientist, $687,000 in back pay and punitive damages against BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee for firing her vindicatively in 2021 after she asked for an exemption from getting the COVID jab due to religious concerns.
I call the firing vindicative because by all measures, the fact tell us it was so.
Hamill [Benton’s attorney] said Benton’s job rarely involved direct interaction with clients, with only 1% of her total annual working hours involving client interaction. In the lawsuit, Hamill said Benton “never performed any work or attended any meetings in medical facilities where patients were being treated” and “physical in-person interaction with co-workers was never a job requirement.”
Moreover, for nineteen months prior to her firing, Benton had done all her work remotely, as ordered by BlueCross itself due to the COVID panic. As noted in her lawsuit:
» Read more
Firefly postpones its next launch attempt to review data
Firefly yesterday scrubbed its second attempt to launch eight cubesats for NASA and others using its Alpha rocket, postponing the next launch attempt in order to the review the ground system issue that caused the two launch aborts on the first launch attempt on July 1, 2024.
In a social media post, the company stated that it’s standing down “to give the team more time to evaluate data and test systems from the first attempt. … We will work closely with the range and our NASA customer to determine the next launch window,” Firefly wrote on X.
This would have been Alpha’s fifth orbital launch. No new launch date has been announced, though it is expected to occur before the end of this month.
Though it has only flown a few times (with some of those launches failures or only partially successful), Firefly’s Alpha rocket has a robust launch manifest, with its biggest contract with Lockheed Martin for 25 launches. It has signed deals to launch from Wallops Island and Vandenberg, as well as the Esrange spaceport in Sweden. And it also has a contract to build the first stage for Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket.
Two German-built spy satellites apparently failed immediately after launch
According to a report in the German press, two spy satellites launched in December 2023 apparently never became operational because the antennas on both failed to deploy.
According to the German publication Der Spiegel, the antennas on the satellites cannot be unfolded. Engineers with OHB have tried to resolve the issue by resetting the flight software, performing maneuvers to vibrate or shake the antennas loose, and more to no avail.
As a result, last week, German lawmakers were informed that the two new satellites will probably not go into operation as planned.
The report also notes that, because both satellites never became operational, they remain the responsibility of the building, a German company OHB. It will have to replace them out of its own pocket. It also appears that the company never tested the antenna deployment system prior to launch.
SpaceX gets NASA contract to launch gamma-ray space telescope
NASA yesterday announced that it has awarded SpaceX a contract to launch a new gamma-ray space telescope, dubbed the Compton Spectrometer and Imager (COSI), using its Falcon 9 rocket and targeting an August 2027 launch date.
The firm-fixed-price contract has a value of approximately $69 million, which includes launch services and other mission related costs. The COSI mission currently is targeted to launch August 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
This wide-field gamma-ray telescope will study energetic phenomena in the Milky Way and beyond, including the creation and destruction of matter and antimatter and the final stages of the lives of stars. NASA’s COSI mission will probe the origins of the Milky Way’s galactic positrons, uncover the sites of nucleosynthesis in our galaxy, perform studies of gamma-ray polarization, and find counterparts to multi-messenger sources. The compact Compton telescope combines improved sensitivity, spectral resolution, angular resolution, and sky coverage to facilitate groundbreaking science.
The stated launch price gives us a sense of what SpaceX is charging these days for launches. The contract award also illustrates once again why the delays in developing ULA’s Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets — caused by Blue Origin’s difficulties in manufacturing its BE-4 rocket engine — has ended up costing both companies a lot of money in sales. SpaceX keeps getting these launch contracts because Vulcan and New Glenn are not yet flying operationally. Vulcan has flown once, but it is probably isn’t capable of adding additional launches to is manifest. More important, the rocket is not yet reusable, and probably could not match SpaceX’s price.
As for New Glenn, it supposedly will make its first launch this fall, but we shall see. It remains four-plus years behind schedule, and though it is described as reusable, its first stage landing vertically like a Falcon 9, it is doubtful it will become doing this on its first launches. It needs to prove out its systems first.
Las Vegas space-related resort (claiming it will be a spaceport) gets FAA airport license
A project to build a space-related resort near Las Vegas has now obtained an airport license from the FAA.
The Federal Aviation Administration said small aircrafts can take off from the site of the Las Vegas Executive Airport, which is proposed to be built on about 240 acres of rural land about 45 minute drive away from Las Vegas. The plan is to develop the site into a Las Vegas Spaceport, according to a news release.
The FAA approval said it doesn’t oppose an airport at the site, the proposed takeoffs won’t need clearance from air traffic control and won’t operate in FAA-controlled airspace. If the airport wants to change any of its operations, it would need FAA approval.
The project, dubbed the Las Vegas Spaceport, intends to build a hotel and space-related training facilities to attract space geeks, and claims it will eventually add a launchpad, but considering its location, that last claim is very unlikely. The airport license however will allow it to add flight-training to its portfolio.
SpaceX launches 20 Starlink satellites
SpaceX early this morning launched another 20 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its sixteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
70 SpaceX
29 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 81 to 44, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 70 to 55.
To get a sense of how incredible SpaceX’s launch pace this year has been, those 70 launches, completed in only days more than first half of the 2024, matches the American record for launches in a entire year, that was set in 1966 and remained the record until 2022.
Lexington Lab Band – Waiting for a Girl Like You
An evening pause: A nice cover of the Foreigner song.
Hat tip Cotour.
July 2, 2024 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.
- FCC says it’s impractical for satellite constellations to block coverage to specific nations
Proves the incompetence of these bureaucrats. Satellite operators have done this for years, with only minor issues.
- English translation of Space Pioneer’s apology letter to nearby residents for its failed static fire test on June 30th
You can feel the Chicoms breathing down the pseudo-company’s neck.
- Roscosmos approves schedule for building new Russian space station
First module is supposed to launch in 2027. You wanna bet?
- India’s Aditya solar telescope just completed its halo orbit around Lagrange 1
The orbit took 178 days, and involved three engine burns to maintain its position.
Democrats: You got what you asked for when the Supreme Court ruled presidents have absolute immunity for official actions
As always, the Democrats have once again demonstrated their utter inability to reflect even slightly on the consequences of their actions.
On July 1, 2024 the Supreme Court, faced with an appeal from Donald Trump that claimed he as president should have immunity from prosecution when his political opponents gain power, ruled that yes, Trump is right, that presidents do have absolute immunity for their “official” actions while in office.
The majority opinion finds that presidents have absolute immunity for core constitutional powers and presumptive immunity for other official acts. This immunity does “not extend to conduct in areas where his authority is shared with Congress,” and unofficial acts taken while in office receive no immunity at all.
The court ruled that President Trump’s conversations with the acting attorney general were core conduct subject to absolute immunity. It also ruled that his conversations with the vice president about the counting of the votes were part of his official duties, thus subject to presumptive, but not absolute, immunity—finding that Judge Chutkan should now assess whether prosecution of these actions intrudes on the authority and functions of the executive branch, and prosecutors will have to rebut the presumption of immunity if so.
Since then Democrat politicians and pundits have been gnashing their teeth in horror, claiming that this ruling now allows presidents to do almost anything once in office, from assassinating their opponents to using the military to arrest and eliminate judges he or she does not like.
The irony here of course escapes the Democrats. First, hasn’t Biden and his Department of Justice and the FBI been doing a milder form of the same abuse of power in their lawfare against Trump and those who worked for him?
Second, this case would never have gotten to the Supreme Court in the first place if the Democrats had not started that lawfare campaign. By prosecuting Trump on numerous weak and sometimes utterly bogus charges, it forced the issue to the courts, which was then forced to rule.
The biggest irony of this whole issue is that the Democrats are right. » Read more
Centrifuge research on ISS suggests some artificial gravity can mitigate negative effects of weightlessness
When I appeared on the Space Show last month I stated something about centrifuge research that was wrong. I had been under the false impression that no such research had yet been done on ISS, and our only data came from one experiment performed by the Soviets on one of their early space stations decades ago.
Charles Lurio, who writes the very respected Lurio Report newsletter on space matters, called me afterward to correct me, and then followed up by sending me a link to a paper describing research on ISS in the past few years using rats inside three different small centrifuges (two of which are shown in the picture to the right). For this information I thank him.
You can download the paper here [pdf]. The research is significant because it suggests that the medical problems of weightlessness can be solved by creating an artificial gravity far less the Earth’s 1g environment. From the paper’s abstract:
» Read more
Geology on Mars is not always what you think it is
For the original images go here and here.
Today’s cool image is actually a comparison of two different high resolution images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), both of which illustrate why it is very dangerous to come to any conclusions about such images without knowing a lot more about them.
The top image to the right, cropped to post here, was a terrain sample image taken on March 30, 2024. Such images are usually taken not to complete any particular research project, but are taken to fill a gap in the schedule in order to maintain the camera’s proper temperature. When the camera team has to do this, they attempt to pick a spot that might have some geological interest. Sometimes they get something surprising. Often however the features in the picture are boring.
In this case they spotted a place where the ground appears appears to be eroding away in a random pattern.
The bottom image, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on March 24, 2024 and was part of planned research. It shows a section of the Martian south ice cap, specifically the area where scientists believe there is a residual permanent small cap of dry ice on top of a thick underlying water ice cap.
Like the top image, the features here suggest some sort of erosion process eating away randomly at the ground’s upper layers.
The two images illustrate the difficulty of interpreting orbital images. At first glance the geological features of both appear very similar. Yet the top image is located in the very dry equatorial regions of Mars, and in fact is inside the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest field of volcanic ash on the red planet. The layers here are likely ash, and the erosion that carved out the hollows likely came from wind. If there ever was near-surface ice at this location, it was many eons ago.
The bottom image however likely shows the sublimation process that is slowly eating away at the residual dry ice cap at the south pole. The Martian north pole does not have residual permanent cap of frozen carbon dioxide, and the reasons why the two caps are different in this way are complex and not completely understood.
Both images show erosion that produces features that look similar. But the materials involved and the causes are completely different.
Remember this when you look at any orbital picture taken of Mars, or any other planetary object. Without the larger context (location, make-up, known history), any guess about the nature of the features there is nothing more than a wild guess, no different than throwing darts at a wall while wearing a blindfold.
Webb takes false-color infrared image of bi-polar protostar nebula
Click for original image.
Scientists using the Webb Space Telescope have now produced a new false-color infrared image of the bi-polar hour-glass-shaped protostar nebula dubbed L1527.
That image is to the left, created from data from Webb’s MIRI (Mid-Infrared Instrument) and cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. While it is not quite a pretty as a prevous Webb infrared image taken in 2022 by its NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), it provides new information about the make-up of materials within this nebula. From the caption:
The areas colored here in blue, which encompass most of the hourglass, show mostly carbonaceous molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. The protostar itself and the dense blanket of dust and a mixture of gases that surround it are represented in red. (The sparkler-like red extensions are an artifact of the telescopes’s optics). In between, MIRI reveals a white region directly above and below the protostar, which doesn’t show as strongly in the NIRCam view. This region is a mixture of hydrocarbons, ionized neon, and thick dust, which shows that the protostar propels this matter quite far away from it as it messily consumes material from its disk.
Previous to Webb, this object had mostly been studied in 2012 using radio and submillimeter wavelengths (see the papers here and here), but those papers determined this is possibly the youngest known protostar, less than 100,000 years old.
Florida approves expansion of spaceport territories
The Florida legislature has now approved two new locations in Florida where rocket launches can take place.
Governor Ron DeSantis signed off on a bill that, as of Monday, will add South Florida’s Homestead Air Reserve Base and the panhandle’s Tyndall Air Force Base to Florida’s growing spaceport territories.
The map to the right shows the spaceport locations within Florida. While the state government might now allow launches from these locations, it is unclear if either military facility is entertaining the idea.
Regardless, the Florida government is clearly intent on encouraging and attracting this new industry to its state.
Blue Origin expands deal to fly citizens free on New Shepard
Blue Origin, in partnership with a non-profit, has expanded its program to fly citizens free on suborbital flights of New Shepard, adding India and what it calls “the small island developing states (SIDS)” to the recently announced deal to fly a Nigerian.
The non-profit, dubbed Space Exploration and Research Agency (SERA), has purchased one seat on each of the next half dozen flights, and will only charge passengers $2.50 for the ticket.
In an unprecedented move, SERA will allow people around the world to vote on which citizens will take the approximately 11-minute journey. Anyone living in one of the program’s partner nations can apply to secure a seat. Applicants must be proficient in English, at least 18 years of age, and meet Blue Origin’s parameters for height, weight, physical fitness, and citizenship.
Five of the seats will be allocated to specific nations, and candidates will be voted on by citizens of those nations. The sixth will be open to anyone within a SERA-partnered country and chosen through a global vote. Remaining seat assignments will be announced later this year.
Overall, this continues the PR stunt nature of Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard, which apparently does not have enough business to fill its passenger manifest, and thus is arranging these give-aways. While the gesture is nice, it would be far better if the company got its orbital rocket off the ground and actually began flying real cargos and passengers into space.
Chad & Jeremy – A Summer Song
An evening pause: Performed live on American Bandstand on November 28, 1964, though the music is almost certainly lip synched.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
July 1, 2024 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.
- Firefly conducts rapid launch operation, transporting payload fairing to pad and mating it to Alpha rocket just 14 hours before launch
That liftoff is scheduled for 9:03 pm (Pacific) tonight. The live stream is here.
Four quick links in connection to Space Pioneer’s static fire test catastrophe yesterday:
- Company say it will continue rocket tests, but no large-scale ones in the near future
I think the company is going to have to explain itself to the Chinese government, which is likely to take a much closer interest in what these pseudo-companies are doing. This will not be to prevent dangerous accidents, but to use this most recent accident as a ploy to gain full control of these pseudo-companies.
- Next Cygnus cargo mission will be named after astronaut Dick Scobee, who died in the 1986 Challenger failure
The freighter will be launched by a Falcon 9 sometime in August.
- Mars Odyssey just completed its 100,000th orbit around Mars
It was launched in 2001, and has been in orbit for more than two decades. Nowadays it mostly serves as a communications satellite, relaying data from the rovers/landers back to Earth.
- ISRO head says design of first module for India’s space station is complete
ISRO hopes to launch that module by 2028.
Sunspot update: The Sun keeps its boom going
Time for my monthly analysis of NOAA’s monthly tracking of the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As always, I have posted NOAA’s updated graph below, adding some details to provide the larger context.
In June the Sun continued the high activity from May, with the sunspot count significantly higher than predicted, 164.2 compared to the prediction of 104.9.
» Read more
Is last week’s Biden-Trump debate a game-changing moment or not?
Joe Biden at his February 2024 press conference
after Justice Department special counsel Robert Hur
revealed he could not indict Biden of criminal misuse
of classified materials because Biden was “an elder
man with poor memory.”
In my life I have seen three moments in politics that appeared to change everything. In two of those cases, the appearance turned out to be true. In the third, in the end nothing changed, to the sad detriment of our country.
Last week’s debate between president Joe Biden and former president Donald Trump appears to be another such potential game-changing event. The change however will not be whether Joe Biden will be the candidate when the election finally rolls around in November, or whether even if he will win or lose the election.
The change, should it happen, will be much more funadmental. I come at this from the point of view of a historian, so bear with me as I attempt to explain.
Of the previous three game-changing moments, the first was the Watergate hearings in 1973. For months prior to those hearings, Republican politicians from all levels of government fought aggressively and with some success the accusations that president Richard Nixon had been involved in the Watergate break-in and the planning of the “dirty tricks” campaign against George McGovern leading up to the 1972 election.
The Watergate hearings however were a game-changer. It forced the entire Republican party to end its unqualified support of Nixon. The hearings, which were televised live each day and covered extensively by the press, were seen by everyone, and showed without doubt the extensive nature of Nixon’s dirty trick activity. It also illustrated bluntly the amount of duplicity and lying that Nixon and his cohorts were willing to do to defend themselves.
Unlike today, in the 1970s the American public did not tolerate lying by their politicians. Though the hearings ended in late June 1973, and Nixon held on until August 1974 before resigning, it was those hearings that ended his popularity and creditability. It was also those hearings that destroyed the creditability of the Republican Party at that time. Too many of them had backed Nixon blindly before the hearings, and were exposed themselves by those hearings as sycophants and toadies. The result: The Republican Party was wiped-out in the 1974 elections, with the Democrats gaining 53 seats in the House, 4 seats in the Senate, and 4 additional governorships.
The second game-changer occurred during the Iran-Contra affair in 1987 against Ronald Reagan. » Read more