Author: Robert Zimmerman

SpaceX’s fourth manned Dragon capsule named “Freedom”

9:38 am

Capitalism in space: The astronauts who will fly to ISS on April 19th on the SpaceX’s fourth manned Dragon capsule announced yesterday that they named it “Freedom,” both to honor that fundamental human right that is also fundamental to American history as well as to honor the memory of the first American spacecraft, Freedom 7, which launched Alan Shepard on his short suborbital flight in 1961.

Once launched, SpaceX will have a fleet of four manned capsules, Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance, and Freedom.

Endeavour has carried humans aloft twice for NASA, and is scheduled to fly a record third time on April 3rd when it carries four commercial passengers to ISS for the company Axiom.

Resilience has also flown twice, once for NASA and once for SpaceX itself, launching a crew of commercial passengers in the fall of 2021.

Endurance has flown once, for NASA.

With the addition of Freedom, SpaceX will have a fleet of four manned spacecraft, matching the size of NASA’s now gone shuttle fleet. Whether the company will need to build more will depend on demand and on the number of missions it thinks these reusable capsules can complete safely.

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NASA solicits proposals for second commercial manned lunar lander

9:25 am

Having received a budget boost from Congress for its manned lunar lander Artemis program, NASA yesterday announced that it is soliciting proposals from the private sector for a second lunar lander, so that the agency will not be reliant only on SpaceX’s Starship.

To bring a second entrant to market for the development of a lunar lander in parallel with SpaceX, NASA will issue a draft solicitation in the coming weeks. This upcoming activity will lay out requirements for a future development and demonstration lunar landing capability to take astronauts between orbit and the surface of the Moon. This effort is meant to maximize NASA’s support for competition and provides redundancy in services to help ensure NASA’s ability to transport astronauts to the lunar surface.

As part of this revised program, NASA also is negotiating a revision to its contract with SpaceX. It appears that this change will have SpaceX fly an additional manned mission with Starship, after which NASA would open up competition to everyone on future flights. The press release however is not entirely clear on this point.

This new competition will of course be a boon to the losers in the first manned lunar lander competition, Blue Origin and Dynetics. Both will certainly submit bids, as will others.

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Blue Origin delays 1st New Glenn launch again

9:10 am

Capitalism in space: At a conference earlier this week Blue Origin officials confirmed that the first test flight of its orbital New Glenn rocket will not occur in ’22, but will be delayed again, into ’23.

New Glenn was originally supposed to launch in 2020, and has been delayed repeatedly since then, first because of new requirements imposed by the military and then because of delays in getting Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine operational.

Though ULA is still aiming to launch its Vulcan rocket using the BE-4 in 2022, expect it to eventually recognize reality and delay also to ’23. That rocket was also supposed to make its first launch in ’20, and has been delayed for the same reasons.

These delays have cost both companies dearly. For example, had each been operational as planned, they might have won some or all of the launch contracts that OneWeb lost from the Russians. Instead, that business went to SpaceX.

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Update on the lie that was COVID

4:12 pm

How governments determined policy against COVID
How our governments determined policy against COVID during
the past two years.

Now that the crisis of the day has shifted to the Ukraine War, bringing with it new demands by our so-called rulers to once again panic in order to begin a world war, it pays to look back at the last fake panic, what I like to call the lie that was COVID.

Below are a only few examples of the never-ending new stories daily that illustrate starkly the foolishness and the over-reaction to COVID. Take some time to read them all.

First, was COVID the deadly disease that could kill you, as claimed by our academic and political leaders? In a word, no. The two stories below simply show its harmlessness to children, something that was obvious almost from the beginning of the panic.

In the past two years anyone with any interest in the truth could have easily found and read similar stories. The threat was routinely exaggerated, sometimes to the point of faking data. These two stories are merely the tip of the iceberg. If I wanted I could add twenty, thirty, fifty more and still not list them all.

Both of these stories however illustrate the evil of the next two:

The New York petty tyrant in the first story is not alone. Democratic Party politicians nationwide, from President Joe Biden down to local school boards, have repeatedly shown themselves obsessed with putting masks on little kids, sometimes even by physical and vicious force.

As for the second story, note that it occurred two days ago in Chicago, the first day that Chicago schools had shifted to a “mask-optional” policy. Yet the teacher smacked a mask of the toddler, who ended up coming home crying. His father’s reaction:
» Read more

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Roscosmos to only accept future payments in rubles

3:10 pm

Shooting yourself in the foot: Dmitry Rogozin today announced that Russia’s space corporation Roscosmos — which controls its entire aerospace industry — will from now on only accept future payments in rubles for foreign companies and countries.

First, because of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of the Ukraine, Roscosmos no longer has much business outside of Russia. There are only a very tiny handful of foreign companies or countries left having contracts with Roscosmos, so this new rule won’t affect many.

Second, this order will guarantee that the last few will flee, and that there will be not any new foreign contracts to follow. The ruble these days is worthless. No one will want to buy rubles to pay Russia. And if they do, it will be a fake paper transaction created only seconds before payment, merely to meet the rule. Why should anyone bother, even China?

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Today’s blacklisted American: Conservatives and the religious blackballed at Disney

12:44 pm

Disney: Hostile to free speech

Persecution is now cool! Even as the corporate management at the Disney company is publicly aligning itself with the gay political agenda, a group of conservative and religious Disney employees have published a letter outlining how this so-called “inclusive” company has made its workplace very hostile to them, forcing many to leave and requiring the letter writers to stay anonymous to protect their jobs.

One of the employees, who works in the Imagineering department designing attractions in Disney theme parks, told The Daily Wire that he’s had three close colleagues leave his division in just the last nine months because of the increasingly hostile work environment. “No matter what department or what segment, we’ve been watching the [diversity, equity, and inclusion] takeover of Disney accelerate to breakneck speeds, and God help you if you get caught standing in front of the train.” [emphasis mine]

The full letter is available here on Google docs. Assuming Google will censor it at some point, the link above has also republished it in full at the bottom of the article. This quote from the letter is especially revealing about the intolerant work atmosphere created by the “woke” Disney employees:
» Read more

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Ingenuity completes 22nd flight; Perseverance on a roll

11:37 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

According to a tweet from JPL on March 21, 2021, Ingenuity successfully completed its 22nd flight on Mars during the March 19-20th weekend, flying for 101 seconds at a height of about 30 feet.

The tweet provided no other information, other than another flight might occur as early as later this week.

However, the most recent map update from the rover/helicopter science teams, shown to the right and annotated to post here, tells us what happened. The white dotted line indicates Perseverance’s travels. The tan dotted line indicated the flight path and landing spots for Ingenuity. The dashed tan lines indicate the planned routes for both. The red dot marks Perseverance’s present location. The green dot marks Ingenuity’s location, after its 22nd flight.

The announced flight plan for Ingenuity’s 22nd flight is shown by the two blue dots, heading north and then making a sharp left before landing. Apparently, the helicopter either did not complete that plan, landing earlier for some reason, or the flight team had decided before takeoff to shorten the flight plan significantly.

What we do know is that the helicopter landed safely, from images downloaded on March 20th [sol 384] and from the JPL tweet. The next flight, targeting later this week, could attempt to complete the previous flight plan, or instead continue to break it up into small sections.

Meanwhile, Perseverance has been racing across the Martian surface, traveling almost as much in the past week as it had for the past year. (See the map from March 16th to compare.) Moreover, the Perseverance team shortened its planned route, cutting to the west of that large crater rather than skirting it to the east. The route taken was probably slightly rougher, but nothing the rover couldn’t handle, and it saved travel time. Apparently, the scientists running the rover are now very eager to finally get to the delta, the mission’s primary geological target.

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ISS: Breaking up is hard to do

11:00 am

According to this detailed article by Eric Berger at Ars Technica, it will be be very difficult if not impossible for Russia to detach its half from ISS and go its own way.

The article outlines both the technical and legal reasons, and concludes as follows:

In reality, during the coming years, we are more likely to see food riots in Moscow than we are to see a new Russian Space Station or a deep space scientific exploration mission. Some of this will be due to financial concerns, and some of it will come because of a loss of access to technology from the West.

Already, Russia’s main builder of tanks, Uralvagonzavod, appears to have stopped production due to a lack of components. Roscosmos’s big four companies—RKK Energia, RSC Progress, the Khrunichev Center, and NPO Energomash—will likely not be able to keep up production for long for the same reason as the tank factory.

While everything Berger notes is true, I think he underestimates the willingness of rogue nations, as Russia presently is, to break treaties. Also, the agreements Russia has signed expire in 2024, and Russia needs the next few years to launch more modules to have any chance of making its half workable. Whether it can do it is presently doubtful, but not impossible.

This partnership is ending, whether by choice or reality. Expect Russia’s participation in ISS to continually wind down over the next few years.

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Startup rocket company begins delivering engines

9:55 am

Capitalism in space: The startup rocket company, Ursa Major, announced today that it has completed qualification tests of its new Hadley rocket engine and has begun delivering flight worthy engines to two different companies.

Startup Ursa Major announced Wednesday that it had completed qualification of its Hadley rocket engine for use by both a space launch vehicle and a hypersonic launch system. The Colorado-based company said it has already started delivering flight-ready Hadley engines to two customers, Phantom Space and Stratolaunch, and plans to produce a total of 30 engines this year.

The engine is relatively small compared to most rocket engines. Phantom will use seven in the first stage of its smallsat Daytona rocket, designed to launch cubesats into orbit. What Stratolaunch will use the engine for is unclear.

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Blue Origin’s engine division manager leaves company; first BE-4 engines arriving in May

9:48 am

Capitalism in space: The head of Blue Origin’s rocket engine division has decided to leave the company, even as it was revealed that the first flight worthy BE-4 engines will not be delivered to ULA until May at the earliest.

According to company sources, the first two BE-4 flight engines are in final production at Blue Origin’s factory in Kent, Washington. The first of these engines is scheduled to be shipped to a test site in May for “acceptance testing” to ensure its flight readiness. A second should follow in reasonably short order. On this schedule, Blue Origin could conceivably deliver both flight engines to United Launch Alliance in June or July. Sources at Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance say development versions of the BE-4—which are nearly identical to the flight versions—have been performing well in tests.

Upon receiving the engines, United Launch Alliance plans to install two of the BE-4s on the Vulcan rocket for a debut launch as soon as possible. While at the Satellite 2022 conference in the District of Columbia, United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno on Tuesday said he still anticipates that Vulcan’s debut launch will occur in 2022. However, a summertime delivery would be a very tight schedule for United Launch Alliance.

ULA was initially promised these engines more than three years ago. The delay not only put its Vulcan rocket three years behind schedule, it has delayed the development of Blue Origin’s own orbital rocket, New Glenn, by more than three years as well.

To supply the needed engines for both rockets Blue Origin will need to establish a production line that can churn them out at a much faster pace than indicated so far. Whether it can remains an unknown, with the exit now of the head of the company’s engine division making that unknown even more worrisome.

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Firefly raises $75 million, targets May for next launch attempt

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: In announcing that the company has raised $75 million more in private investment capital, Firefly officials also said that it is now targeted May for its next launch attempt of its Alpha rocket.

The launch was partly delayed because of the federal government’s insistence that a Ukrainian businessman, who had saved the company when it went into bankruptcy, divest his ownership. That has now happened, so Firefly has gotten approval to launch.

Firefly CEO Tom Markusic told CNBC that the company “worked methodically and cooperatively with the government” to both complete the divestment, as well as to add “security protocols” at the company.

With the move complete, Markusic said the company now has “full access to our facilities to go back and launch.” Firefly will next transport its second Alpha rocket from its headquarters near Austin, Texas, to California, and aims to launch as soon as it can.

“We think it’ll take us about eight weeks from here to launch — so in May is our target,” Markusic told CNBC.

The company is also aiming to complete its second test launch two months after the first, assuming all goes well.

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SpaceX switches to newer Starship and Superheavy for orbital test

9:25 am

Capitalism in space: According to Elon Musk, SpaceX has decided that the company will no longer use Starship prototype #20 and Superheavy prototype #4 for the rocket’s first orbital test flight.

Instead, the company will fly two more recently built and upgraded prototypes, rumored to be numbers #24 for Starship and #7 for Superheavy. The company has also decided to switch from the first generation Raptor engines to Raptor-2s.

All these changes likely explain Musk’s announcement that the first orbital launch will not happen sooner than May. The changes also further suggest that SpaceX has realized federal permission to launch from Boca Chica will be further delayed, and thus it might has well push forward in other ways as it waits for the right to launch.

I suspect that if the federal government hadn’t moved in to block operations, it would have flown prototypes 20 and 4 two months ago, just to get some data. Now such a flight seems pointless, as more advanced prototypes are now almost ready to fly.

This decision also reinforces my prediction that no orbital flights will occur out of Boca Chica before summer, and are more likely blocked through November. It also increases my expectation that the first orbital flight might not occur at all in Texas. The longer the Biden administration delays SpaceX’s operations there, the greater the chance the entire Starship/Superheavy launch program will shift to Florida.

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Local state legislators introduce bill to disband Camden spaceport authority

9:14 am

Two Georgia state legislators yesterday introduced a bill to disband the Camden spaceport authority, following a county special election that rejected the spaceport by a vote of 72% to 28%.

Whether the bill becomes law or not will likely not make much difference to the spaceport. It is dead, and the law will merely decide whether it dies quickly, or slowly.

This quote by one of the legislators who introduced the bill, however, should be carved in stone in every statehouse and in the Capitol in Washington:

“It’s hard to ignore how the people vote.”

Too many lawmakers nationwide have forgotten this fact.

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Starlink raises its prices

9:06 am

Capitalism in space: Starlink has now unveiled newer higher prices for getting its internet service, even for those who had previously put down a deposit for the service.

Originally, opting into Starlink required a $499 upfront purchase of a starter kit with all the necessary supplies, including a user terminal, or antenna, for connecting with SpaceX’s satellites. Customers would then pay a $99 monthly charge to keep the service running. Now, the new monthly price going forward will be $110. All new orders of the Starlink kit will now cost $599, and anyone who put down a deposit for the original $499 kit will have to pay $549 instead. The new monthly prices will come into effect at different times for different customers.

The price increase either indicates the lack of competition existing for those who want good internet service in the regions Starlink presently serves, or it suggests the cost of launching the system is higher than Starlink first anticipated. Either way, the higher cost gives an opportunity to others.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Emmett Till opera canceled because lyrics were written by a white

1:26 pm

Emmett Till, censored by anti-white bigots
Emmett Till, a black murder victim banned again for associating
with whites.

The new dark age of silencing: More than 12,000 students at the City University of New York (CUNY) have signed a petition to have an opera about the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till cancelled because its lyricist, Clare Coss, happens to be white.

John Jay College of Criminal Justice student Mya Bishop created the Change.org petition in an attempt to halt the continuation of ‘Emmett Till, A New American Opera’ at the school’s Gerald W. Lynch Theatre. In the petition’s description, she wrote that the show is all about playwright Clare Coss’ ‘white guilt’ rather than the appalling killing of Till, 14, for allegedly flirting with a white woman.

This petition is unmitigated bigotry, trying to get the opera cancelled simply because Coss is white. What makes it even more indicative of our new dark age of ignorance is that the composer, Mary Watkins, is black. As she notes:
» Read more

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The unbelievably rough and wind-swept surface of Mars’ Greenheugh pediment

11:17 am

Gator-back terrain on Mars
Click for full image.

Since my last update on the travels of the Mars rover Curiosity on February 22, 2022, the rover has been been creeping ever so slowly westward across a plateau that scientists have dubbed the Greenheugh pediment.

Scientists have known for years that the surface of the pediment was going to be rough going. This panorama taken by Curiosity when it first climbed up to the pediment in March 2020 to take a peek before retreating revealed that roughness starkly.

In truth, since beginning its traverse of that pediment in February, the Curiosity team has found the ground not only as rough as expected, but beautiful in a strange sort of way, as illustrated by the March 20, 2022 photo to the right, reduced to post here. As Lauren Edgar, Planetary Geologist at USGS Astrogeology Science Center, noted yesterday in a Curiosity update that featured this image:
» Read more

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NASA: Europa Clipper’s cost rise; Mars sample return delayed

10:10 am

At a meeting this week NASA officials admitted that the cost of its Europa Clipper mission has risen by three quarters of a billion dollars, and that the sample return mission to bring back Perseverance’s core samples will be delayed, as well as now require two landers, not one.

NASA revealed significant changes to two of its flagship planetary science missions at today’s Space Science Week meeting at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. The cost for Europa Clipper, which will gather data as it makes multiple swingbys of Jupiter’s moon Europa, has grown from $4.25 billion to $5 billion. Separately, NASA and ESA are replanning the Mars Sample Return mission. Two landers are needed instead of one to retrieve samples from the surface of Mars and boost them into orbit for their trip back to Earth. The launches will be in 2028 instead of 2026.

The sample return mission itself is also growing in complexity:

A Sample Fetch Rover will be sent to collect them and take them to a Mars Ascent Vehicle — a rocket — that will shoot them into Martian orbit where they will be transferred to an Earth Return Orbiter for the trip back to Earth.

Initially the plan was for the fetch rover and ascent vehicle to be launched together in 2026, and the Earth Return Orbiter in 2027. But Zurbuchen decided to convene an Independent Review Board in 2020 to get an impartial assessment of the plan by outside experts. The Board cautioned that 2026 was “not achieveable” with 2028 a more realistic date, and that the “program’s schedule and cost are not aligned with its scope.”

Consequently, NASA now has replanned the mission with two landers — one each for the fetch rover and ascent vehicle — instead of one. Both landers will launch in 2028. The Earth Return Orbiter will still launch in 2027. The samples will get back to Earth in 2033.

Prediction: The launch of this fleet of sample return spacecraft will be further delayed, and its overall cost will rise, by a lot. In fact, it is very possible that SpaceX’s Starship will have already returned samples from Mars before NASA’s mission gets off the ground.

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Scientists: Enceladus’ tiger stripes come from underground ocean

9:58 am

The uncertainty of science: Using a new computer model, scientists now think they have shown how on the Saturn moon Enceladus pressure from an underground ocean can push through cracks to produce geysers on the surface.

Rudolph and his colleagues ran a physics-based model to map the conditions that could allow the cracks from the surface to reach the ocean and cause the eruptions. The model accounts for cycles of warming and cooling that last on the scale of a hundred million years, associated with changes in Enceladus’ orbit around Saturn. During each cycle, the ice shell undergoes a period of thinning and a period of thickening. The thickening happens through freezing at the base of the ice shell, which grows downward like the ice on a lake, Rudolph said.

The pressure exerted by this downward-expanding ice on the ocean below is one possible mechanism researchers have proposed to explain Enceladus’ geysers. As the outer ice shell cools and thickens, pressure increases on the ocean underneath because ice has more volume than water. The increasing pressure also generates stress in the ice, which could become pathways for fluid to reach the surface 20-30 kilometers away.

You can read the paper here.

Be warned: This is only a model. Moreover, its conclusions suggest that this mechanism will not work on Jupiter’s moon Europa, which has many planet-wide crack-like features that suggest (as yet unconfirmed) a bubbling up from below.

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Musk says Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in May

9:47 am

Capitalism in space: In a tweet yesterday Elon Musk said that Starship will be ready for first orbital launch in May, a delay of two months from his previous announcements.

“We’ll have 39 flightworthy engines built by next month, then another month to integrate, so hopefully May for orbital flight test,” Musk tweeted in response to CNBC.

While the delay could certainly be because the company needed to prepare enough Superheavy engines, I also suspect it is also because Musk now expects the FAA to not approve the environmental reassessment of Starship’s Boca Chica launch site by the end of March, as has been promised. I predict that sometime in the next few days the FAA will announce another one-month delay in that process, the fourth such delay by that federal agency.

In late-December, when the FAA announced the first delay, I predicted that the first orbital launch of Starship would not happen until the latter half of ’22. I now think that prediction was optimistic. I firmly believe the federal government, controlled by Democrats, will delay that launch until after the mid-term elections in November. It appears to me that the Biden administration wants to reject the environmental reassessment, which would block Starship flights from Boca Chica for years. It just doesn’t want to do it before November, because of the negative election consequences.

I truly hope my cynical and pessimistic analysis is utterly wrong. So far, however, my prediction has proven to be more right than wrong.

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South Korea to build its own unmanned lunar lander

9:31 am

The new colonial movement: The government of South Korea has begun a project to build its own unmanned lunar lander, scheduled for launch sometime in the 2030s.

South Korea presented an action plan to develop a lunar lander weighing more than 1.5 tons that would carry out scientific research on the surface of the moon in the 2030s. The project is to begin in 2024 after a preliminary feasibility study.

The Ministry of Science and ICT would form a working group of industry-academic experts to conduct research on a lunar lander and draw up strategies and detailed plans by August 2022. It is a follow-up project to launch a lunar orbiter in August 2022. The lunar lander will be lifted by a next-generation homemade rocket.

The goal is to encourage the country’s own aerospace industry. The working group will spend the next month recruiting South Korean companies to join the project.

South Korea however has to first get its own homemade rocket, Nuri, to successfully launch. The first launch attempt in October 2021 failed, and the second has been delayed to fix the cause.

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SpaceX ends future business with launch services company Spaceflight

9:24 am

Capitalism in space: For reasons not explained, SpaceX has ended all further business with the launch services company Spaceflight, which acts to find and integrate smallsats from many different companies into a package for launch.

Spaceflight also provides many of those smallsats with a small tug, dubbed Sherpa-LTC, to move them into their preferred orbit once deployed from the Falcon 9 upper stage. It looks like there have recently been problems with this tug that Spaceflight has not been able to resolve to SpaceX’s satisfaction.

The propulsion leak on Spaceflight’s Sherpa-LTC vehicle was discovered about three weeks before the Jan. 13 SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-3 launch. Root-cause analysis of the leak traced the problem to an oxidizer circuit in the propulsion system, which worked as designed but vented some trapped liquid due to a design flaw.

…Regarding the upcoming launch, Spaceflight began working with SpaceX to address concerns about “the analysis and test results of Sherpa and its customer payloads” as soon as it became aware of them.

Despite Spaceflight’s “best efforts, SpaceX chose not to fly the Sherpa vehicle until the analysis and test approaches could be better understood,” Sorensen said. “We continue to work with SpaceX to understand their decision and address any concerns for future missions.”

It appears, though not confirmed, that SpaceX is not just worried about Sherpa, but is also concerned about Spaceflight’s quality control efforts, and that might be the reason it has reject Spaceflight from future launches.

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Sharpest radio image ever taken of newly discovered space object

9:11 am

The first known Odd Radio Circle (ORC)
Click for full image.

The uncertainty of science: Astronomers, using the MeerKat radio telescope in South Africa, have taken the best radio image yet of a newly discovered type of astronomical object, dubbed whimsically as an odd radio circle (ORC).

The photo to the right is that image. While it is reminiscent of the many planetary nebulae seen in visible light that astronomers have been studying since the 1800s, this weird shape is only seen in radio frequencies, and it is much much larger.

Odd radio circles are so named because they’re large, circular objects which are bright around the edges at radio wavelengths, but which can’t be seen with optical, infrared or X-ray telescopes – and at this stage, astronomers don’t really know what they are.

And they’re massive – about a million light years across, making them sixteen times larger than our own galaxy. But despite their gargantuan size, the objects are difficult to spot, hiding in plain sight.

Planetary nebulae are generally the size of solar systems.

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Russia launches military communications satellite with Soyuz-2 rocket

8:57 am

Russia today successfully launched its tenth Meridian military communications satellite from its Plesetsk spaceport in the Russian interior, using a Soyuz-2 rocket.

Like China, Russian launches drop the expendable first stages and boosters on land. From the article:

On March 17, 2022, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced danger zones in three areas of the Komi Republic: the “Vashka” site in the Udorsky District, and “Zheleznodorozhny” site in the Knyazhpogostsky and Kortkerossky districts. According to the warning, the launch of the Soyuz-2 rocket was planned for March 22, 2022, between 15:00 and 17:00 Moscow Time (8:00 – 10:00 a.m. EDT). Backup launch opportunities were reserved for March 23, 24 and 25.

The announced impact sites matched the ground track required for the mission to access an orbit with an inclination 62.8 degrees toward the Equator, which is used by Meridian military communications satellites.

Such danger zones in Russia are the routine for every launch since Sputnik in 1957. And unlike China Russia never made any effort to develop methods for controlling the crash landing of its first stages.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

11 SpaceX
6 China
4 Russia

The U.S. still leads China 17 to 6 in the national rankings.

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Colorful Mars

4:54 pm

Colorful Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image illustrates that Mars is not merely the Red Planet, but actually does have places on its surface that are colorful and interesting. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was today’s picture of the day for the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). As Alfred McEwen of the Lunar & Planetary Laboratory in Arizona notes in the caption:

This region of Mars has a diversity of minerals resulting in especially colorful images. However, the geology is complex and not easy to understand. Nili Fossae has often been on the list for potential landing sites for robotic exploration, and will likely continue to be so given its rich landscape.

When I asked McEwen what minerals are indicated by the different colors, he responded that at the scale provided by MRO, the reddish colors indicated dust or water-altered minerals like clays, and the blue/green colors indicated mafic minerals like pyroxene and olivine.

You can get a sense of the scale by looking at the wider image below. The overview map below that provides some interesting context, including a hint as to why Perseverance landed where it did.
» Read more

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Pushback: Judge rules university officials can be held personally responsible for firing a professor for his political opinions

12:36 pm

Speech that is forbidden at the University of North Texas
Speech that is forbidden at the University of North Texas

A major victory for free speech: A federal judge ruled on March 11th that officials at the University of North Texas can be held personally responsible for firing a professor because they did not like his political opinions.

In his 69-page order of March 11, Judge Sean Jordan, of the United States District Court for Eastern Texas, found that university officials should have known that math professor Nathaniel Hiers’ speech “touched on a matter of public concern and that discontinuing his employment because of his speech violated the First Amendment,” before they fired him for going public with his disagreement with the left-wing concept of “microaggressions.”

The university was claiming qualified immunity for school officials in the case, meaning that the school wanted its officials to be excluded from being held responsible for their actions merely because they were acting in their position as state employees. Jordan denied the claim of qualified immunity and also denied the school’s demand to have the case dismissed outright.

You can read the judge’s order here [pdf].

The background: Hiers, having found flyers in math department’s lounge warning faculty against triggering “microaggessions” in their conversations, responded as shown in the picture above, placing one flyer on the chalk rack of the blackboard and wrote his own opinion of it above.

Ralf Schmidt, the Math department’s head, immediately criticized Hiers for doing this, and within a week fired him without notice.
» Read more

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OneWeb signs deal with SpaceX to launch its remaining satellites, replacing Russia

9:07 am

Capitalism in space: Just 18 days after its contract with Arianespace was suspended because of Russia invasion of the Ukraine, OneWeb has now signed a deal with SpaceX to use its Falcon 9 rocket to launch the remaining 200+ satellites in its satellite constellation.

Few details about the agreement were released Monday morning. “Terms of the agreement with SpaceX are confidential,” OneWeb said in a statement.

OneWeb said the “first launch” with SpaceX is expected before the end of this year, suggesting the company anticipates multiple flights on SpaceX rockets.

It appears that launches could start before the end of this year

There are two big losers in this story. The obvious one is Russia, as it has lost OneWeb as a satellite customer. The second, less obvious, is Arianespace, as it appears it has also lost OneWeb as a customer. It will also have to refund OneWeb any payments the satellite company made for launches that have not occurred, even those that Arianespace had paid Russia for which Russia is refusing to refund.

Though no details have been released about the deal, I would not be surprised if OneWeb got a better price than what it was paying Arianespace. I also suspect that Elon Musk was willing to make this deal with OneWeb, the prime competitor to his Starlink satellite constellation, because he favors the Ukraine in this war.

Finally, this deal will not only make Russia look bad, it will make SpaceX look magnificent. Its PR value cannot be measured for the company.

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