Author: Robert Zimmerman

A chain of Martian sinkholes

3:19 pm

Chain of sinkholes on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 17, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a somewhat straight depression with several wider and deeper pits along it.

The feature immediately suggests sinkholes that exist because the ground is sagging into voids below ground. Yet, both the straight and circular depressions also appear filled, showing no evidence that they connect to any below ground cavities.

Are the sinks the result of a fissure produced by a graben, when two large blocks shift relative to each other to cause a fissure to appear? Or are they evidence of an underground lava tube? Or maybe they are the filled remains of a now mostly buried canyon carved by water or ice?

As always, a wider view helps clarify things, though whether it answers the question is uncertain.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist activist group wants Fox News banned

1:04 pm

Fox News: Banned!

Blacklists are back and the Democrats have got ’em: A leftist activist veterans group aligned closely with the Democratic Party has begun a campaign to get Fox News banned from all military bases.

The group VoteVets, which works to elect liberal veterans to public office, took specific aim at controversial Fox News personality Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson has been at odds with Pentagon leaders in recent months after segments in which he seemed to suggest the U.S. military has become more concerned with diversity and political correctness than winning wars.

But the VoteVets petition steered clear of those issues. Instead, it took aim at Mr. Carlson‘s ambivalent comments about COVID-19 vaccines and specifically blasted a recent segment in which the Fox host said that Democrats want to make life difficult for the unvaccinated.

Essentially, this Democratic Party political organization wants to ban on military bases the speech of anyone who might express skepticism about any policy put forth by that party.

And why not? This tactic by Democrats and their ilk — of blacklisting and silencing their opponents — has been working like a dream. They are finding that Americans are afraid of them, and are willing to meet their every demand in order to avoid being attacked themselves.
» Read more

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The number of new smallsat rocket startups continues to grow

9:31 am

Capitalism in space: According to a new annual report, the number of new smallsat rocket startups that have been proposed continues to grow, though the number presently in actual development or operation declined slightly in the past year.

That total has grown to 155 vehicles, he said, ranging from 10 vehicles in operation to several dozen that have gone defunct since the survey started in 2015, when about 30 vehicles were included. “I was really expecting to see a slowdown in the number of new launch vehicles that we were seeing coming out of the woodwork in the last few years,” he said during a conference session Aug. 11. “It turns out that slowdown has not happened at all.”

There have been some changes in the industry, though. He found the number of vehicles in active development declined slightly from last year, to 48, with a decrease as well in the number of vehicle concepts on a “watch” list that have not yet entered active development. More than 40 vehicles are now classified as defunct, about 10 more than last year. “This is not surprising given the challenges of getting one of these vehicles fielded,” he said.

The U.S. has the most smallsat startups in development, 22, but China has the most that the report defines as operational, six of ten. This last number should change considerably if the planned launches of six or so American smallsat rocket startups occur as promised in the next six months.

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China to fly asteroid sample mission in ’24

9:19 am

The new colonial movement: Chinese scientists have revealed that China is now building an asteroid sample mission to launch in ’24 and grab samples in ’25 from the near Earth asteroid dubbed Kamoʻoalewa.

According to a correspondence in Nature Astronomy, there are two typical approaches to sampling asteroids like Kamoʻoalewa, namely anchor-and-attach and touch-and-go.

The former requires delicate and dangerous interactions with the planetary body but allows more controllable sampling and more chances for surface analysis. The latter, used by Hayabusa 2 and OSIRIS-Rex, is a quick interaction facilitated by advanced navigation, guidance and control and fine control of thrusters.

China’s mission will use both architectures in order to “guarantee that at least one works.” The paper states that there is “still no successful precedent for the anchor-and-attach architecture,” meaning a possible deep space first. A 2019 presentation reveals that China’s spacecraft will attempt to land on the asteroid using four robotic arms, with a drill on the end of each for anchoring.

The attempt to do both these approaches is audacious, especially because the evidence from both OSIRIS-REx and Hayabusa-2 is that it will be difficult to safely land and hold onto a rubble pile asteroid. The material is too loosely held together.

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Confirmed: Perseverance sample was too crumbly and poured away

8:58 am

Perseverance scientists have confirmed that the reason their sample container was empty once stored on the rover was because the material that they had drilled into was more crumbly than expected, and when the core was extracted from the ground the powder simply poured out of the core tube.

The team has decided to move on.

Rather than try again with the cratered floor fractured rough, Perseverance has already departed the area and is heading towards a region named South Séítah, which likely contains layered sedimentary rocks that are more similar to the Earth rocks that engineers drilled during tests before the mission’s launch. “We are going to step back and do something we are more confident of,” says Trosper. The rover will try to drill a core there, perhaps in early September. When it does, engineers will pause the automated drilling process to check whether a core has been extracted before the rover takes the next steps of sealing the tube and storing it away.

While it makes sense to find a different place to drill for a core sample, it appears that Perseverance is designed in a manner that it can do no analysis of any drill hole material:

Curiosity and Perseverance are similar in many respects — Perseverance was actually built using much of the leftover hardware from Curiosity — but there is one major difference in how they drill into the Martian surface. Curiosity intentionally grinds rock into powder, which it then places inside analytical instruments it has onboard to conduct scientific studies. NASA designed Perseverance to extract intact cores that slide into its sampling tubes. So crumbly rocks are good for Curiosity, but not for Perseverance.

If Perseverance can do no analysis of any drillholes, this limits the science it can do significantly. While putting aside samples for later return to Earth is an excellent idea, to make this the priority so that Perseverance can analyze nothing seems a terrible decision. What if that sample return mission never gets built?

If my supposition here is correct it also means NASA’s repeated claim that Perseverance is searching for ancient life on Mars is even more of a lie than I had assumed. It isn’t merely that this claim is a distortion of Perseverance’s actual research goals — to study the geology of Mars — the rover can’t look for ancient life. It has no way of looking at any samples it digs up.

I am not sure if my conclusions here are entirely correct. For example, maybe they hope to find this alien evidence by looking at the sealed core samples they store. Unfortunately, I have no idea, because I am somewhat handicapped in describing Perseverance’s day-by-day operations because, unlike Curiosity, the Perseverance team is providing no regular updates of their operations at their blog. While the Curiosity team posts something at least twice a week, the Perseverance team has posted nothing since just after landing in February. I’ve emailed NASA about this, but have gotten no response.

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India’s GSLV rocket fails in first launch since 2019

6:09 pm

India’s attempt today to resume launches of its large GSLV rocket, stalled because of the Wuhan panic since its last launch in 2019, failed today when something went wrong with the third stage.

This entirely Indian-built rocket is the one they plan to use for their manned missions. This failure will certainly set that program back, already delayed significantly because of the shut down of their entire launch industry because of COVID-19.

The satellite, also Indian-built, is also a big loss. It was to be the first in a series of Earth observation satellites.

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Jim Nabors – Impossible Dream

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed in season four, 1967, of the Gomer Pyle television show, where Nabors played Gomer Pyle as a country bumpkin. When he sang this, however, he shocked not only his sergeant, he surprised the nation, since few knew he was such a polished singer.

The song is from my childhood, when Americans were all hopeful, confident, and knew their nation’s real history, based on liberty and freedom, a history that had strived consistently to achieve that for everyone.

Hat tip Tom Biggar.

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OSIRIS-REx scientists refine Bennu’s future Earth impact possibilities

1:28 pm

Using the orbital and gravity data compiled during OSIRIS-REx’s visit to the asteroid Bennu, scientists have refined its future orbits as well as the most likely moments it might impact the Earth.

In 2135, asteroid Bennu will make a close approach with Earth. Although the near-Earth object will not pose a danger to our planet at that time, scientists must understand Bennu’s exact trajectory during that encounter in order to predict how Earth’s gravity will alter the asteroid’s path around the Sun – and affect the hazard of Earth impact.

Using NASA’s Deep Space Network and state-of-the-art computer models, scientists were able to significantly shrink uncertainties in Bennu’s orbit, determining its total impact probability through the year 2300 is about 1 in 1,750 (or 0.057%). The researchers were also able to identify Sept. 24, 2182, as the most significant single date in terms of a potential impact, with an impact probability of 1 in 2,700 (or about 0.037%).

Although the chances of it hitting Earth are very low, Bennu remains one of the two most hazardous known asteroids in our solar system, along with another asteroid called 1950 DA.

This paper’s conclusions are confirming what had been found earlier in the mission, while OSIRIS-REx was still flying in formation with the asteroid. Nonetheless, it is essential to refine these numbers as precisely as possible, so this confirmation is excellent news.

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Glacial ice sheets on Mars?

1:10 pm

Glacial ice sheets on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on June 29, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The location is in Mars’ glacier country, that strip of chaos terrain that runs about 2,000 miles along the transition zone between the northern lowland plains and the southern cratered highlands at 30 to 47 degrees north latitude. This particular feature is located in Deuteronilus Mensae, the westernmost region of that strip of chaos.

I call this glacier country because practically every image taken by MRO’s high resolution camera in this region suggests the presence of glacial material covered by a protective layer of debris. The photo to the right is typical, though a bit more puzzling because of the depressions that appear to run along highpoints.

As usual, the overview map below helps explain what we are looking at.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: YouTube blacklists U.S. senator for saying things YouTube dislikes

11:40 am

Censored by YouTube
Senator Rand Paul: censored by YouTube

The new dark age of silencing: YouTube has once again removed videos of Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) while also suspending him for a week, because he stated facts about COVID-19 and masks that YouTube dislikes.

YouTube last week removed a video of an interview the Kentucky Republican senator did on Newsmax. Paul discussed his suspicions about the origins of the coronavirus, his feud with Anthony Fauci over what funding for research in China’s Wuhan lab came from the United States, and argued that most face coverings do not help stop the spread of the virus.

Paul, an eye doctor, then recorded, and on Aug. 3 uploaded, a second video chastising YouTube for taking down the video and promoted one of its competitors, Rumble. He defended his comments on masks. “Saying cloth masks work, when they don’t, actually risks lives, as someone may choose to care for a loved one with COVID while only wearing a cloth mask. This is not only bad advice but also potentially deadly misinformation,” Paul said in the video.

YouTube responded by taking down that video as well, saying that it violated YouTube’s community guidelines. On Tuesday, Paul’s office said that the company imposed a seven-day ban from posting more videos.

» Read more

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India begins countdown for 1st GSLV rocket launch since 2019

9:52 am

India today began the countdown for its first GSLV rocket launch in more than two years, since it launched the lunar orbiter Chandrayaan-2 with the lunar rover/lander that crashed onto the surface shortly thereafter.

The launch is targeted for 8:13 p.m (Eastern) tonight.

The long gap in GSLV launches was almost entirely because of India’s panic over the Wuhan flu. For the past year and a half its space agency ISRO has completed three just launches, all of which were delayed until late in 2020 because of the panic. Prior to that panic, India had hoped to launch as many as 8 to 12 times in ’20 and ’21 each. Instead, their space industry shut down, and the commercial business they hoped to capture went to American private companies instead.

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Intuitive Machines awards SpaceX another lunar lander launch contract

9:36 am

Intuitive Machines Nova-C lunar lander
Artist’s impression of Intuitive Machines lunar lander,
on the Moon

Capitalism in space: Intuitive Machines announced yesterday that it has awarded SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket the launch contract for its third unmanned lunar lander, making SpaceX its carrier for all three.

The key quote however from the article is this:

Intuitive Machines’ first two lander missions are carrying out task orders for NASA awarded under its Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. However, IM-3 is not linked to any CLPS missions. Marshall said that the mission “has an open manifest for commercial and civil customers.”

In other words, this third launch is being planned as an entirely private lunar robotic mission. Intuitive Machines is essentially announcing that it will launch the lander and has room for purchase for anyone who wants to send a payload to the Moon. This opportunity is perfect for the many universities that have programs teaching students how to build science payloads and satellites. For relatively little, a school can offer its students the chance to fly something to the lunar surface. Not only will it teach them how to build cutting edge engineering, it will allow those students to do cutting edge exploration.

This is the whole concept behind the recommendations I put forth in my 2016 policy paper, Capitalism in Space. If the government will simply buy what it needs from the private sector, and let that sector build and own what it builds, that sector will construct things so that their products can be sold to others, and thus expand the market.

Since around 2018 NASA and the federal government has apparently embraced those recommendations, and we are about to see that policy bear fruit in unmanned lunar exploration. Below is a list of all planned robotic lander missions to the Moon, all scheduled for the next four years:
» Read more

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Rocket Lab to launch three times in one month, beginning in late August

8:55 am

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab yesterday announced that it is aiming to complete three launches of its Electron rocket in less than a month, with the first scheduled for late August.

Scheduled to lift-off from Launch Complex 1 on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula in late August, the ‘Love At First Insight’ mission will be Rocket Lab’s 22nd Electron launch overall and fifth mission of 2021. ‘Love At First Insight’ is the first in a rapid succession of scheduled Electron launches between late August through September that represent the company’s fastest launch turnarounds to date.

All three launches are for the company BlackSky, which is putting into orbit a constellation of Earth-imaging small satellites.

Since 2018 Rocket Lab has repeatedly promised that it will soon ramp up its launch rate to monthly, and then weekly. For a variety of reasons, mostly relating to two launch failures in the past year, that promise has not been kept. If the company succeeds in putting these six Black Sky satellites into orbit on three quick launches, it will finally come close to demonstrating that pace.

Rocket Lab will reinforce that promise if it also completes its manifest of 2021 launches, which calls for three more launches for a total of nine launches in ’21, six of which will have occurred in the year’s last four months.

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Antares rocket successfully launches Cygnus freighter to ISS

8:36 pm

Capitalism in space: Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket today successfully launched a Cygnus cargo capsule to ISS.

This was the fourth launch this year for Northrop Grumman’s launch division, which was once the company Orbital ATK. It was also the most in a single year for that division since it launched five times in 2013.

26 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. now leads China 31 to 26 in the national rankings.

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Don McLean – Vincent

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live 1999.

I often empathize greatly with this song, and its closing verses:

Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
And how you suffered for your sanity
And how you tried to set them free

They would not listen, they’re not listening still
Perhaps they never will

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Inspector general slams NASA spacesuit program

12:39 pm

NASA's failed spacesuit
NASA’s failed spacesuit

A NASA inspector general report released today [pdf] bluntly slammed NASA endless and much delayed project to develop a new spacesuit for its Artemis program.

After noting that the project has been ongoing at NASA for fourteen years, the summary then blasts the program hard:

NASA’s current schedule is to produce the first two flight-ready xEMUs [NASA acronym for spacesuits] by November 2024, but the Agency faces significant challenges in meeting this goal. This schedule includes approximately a 20-month delay in delivery for the planned design, verification, and testing suit, two qualification suits, an ISS Demo suit, and two lunar flight suits. These delays—attributable to funding shortfalls, COVID-19 impacts, and technical challenges—have left no schedule margin for delivery of the two flight-ready xEMUs. Given the integration requirements, the suits would not be ready for flight until April 2025 at the earliest. Moreover, by the time two flight-ready xEMUs are available, NASA will have spent over a billion dollars on the development and assembly of its next-generation spacesuits.

Given these anticipated delays in spacesuit development, a lunar landing in late 2024 as NASA currently plans is not feasible. [emphasis mine]

This bears repeating: NASA will spent more than a billion dollars and fourteen years to build two spacesuits. What a bargain! Imagine if we have to pay a tailor for fitting!

And yet, despite this incredibly inefficient use of money, the report also finds that NASA doesn’t have enough to get the suits made on time!

Besides the endless managerial incompetencies noted in the report, it also notes several technical issues contributing to the problems, including one case where “staff used the wrong specifications” causing a unit’s failure.

Overall, the entire management of this program by NASA and the government appears to have been confused, incoherent, wasteful, and unable to get the job done, a pattern quite typical of almost every government project for the past four decades. Yet, though the report notes that in October 2019 the agency had finally decided to dump this failed program entirely and instead hire private companies to build the suits, the report criticizes this change, noting that the commercial contractors will not be required to use NASA designs, meaning the $420 million NASA has spent will literally be wasted.

So what? That money has been wasted already. I am quite willing to bet that for no more than a quarter of that cost, two private companies could get new spacesuits ready, and do it quickly, as long as our entirely incompetent government gets out of their way.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Medical student expelled for expressing political opinions

12:02 pm

Baby killing okay at University of Kentucky
Harming babies and children appears to be official
policy at the University of Louisville.

Less than a year from completing his four year program as a medical student at the University of Louisville, Austin Clark was expelled because he had revealed his Christian pro-life beliefs by inviting a pro-life advocate to speak at the campus.

In July, 2021 he filed a lawsuit in an attempt to get reinstated.

The medical student’s complaint is against President Neeli Bendapudi of the University of Louisville School of Medicine along 13 others connected to the school. Why does he say he was so suddenly expelled?

In his lawsuit, Austin alleges that the trouble with the school began when his pro-life group hosted speaker Alex McFarland in Fall, 2018. Austin was on the leadership board of the Medical Students for Life group [SFLA] at University of Louisville School of Medicine. The administration did everything they could to prevent the event from happening, largely by mandating impossibly expensive security fees – a common tactic of schools trying to silence views of the students they don’t like, as SFLAction/SFLA President Kristan Hawkins observed in her Wall Street Journal opinion piece. The student group even had to involve Alliance Defending Freedom, a legal foundation committed to the free speech of conservative students, to ensure that the event took place.

As noted in SFLA’s news release on the lawsuit, Austin says that from that point until his 2020 dismissal from the medical school, professors retaliated against him for his views, calling him “stupid” and questioning if his “brain was working” among the derogatory comments made. He was subjected to abuse, changes to his grades and forced to sign a “professionalism contract” that other students had not been required to sign. In his lawsuit, Clark alleges that he was “was physically harassed and bullied” as well.

The article at the link also cites a great deal of evidence that the university’s is closely tied with “the only remaining abortion clinic in Kentucky.”
» Read more

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Eric Berger: FAA regulators should get out of the way

10:16 am

In a essay today for Ars Technica, Eric Berger makes note of the progress that SpaceX is making on its Starship/Superheavy rocket, and points out that the one major obstacle that SpaceX cannot control and that stands in its way is the revised “environmental assessment” the FAA still must approve to permit the rocket to launch from Boca Chica.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle of all will be clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration, which is working with SpaceX to conduct an environmental assessment of launching such a mammoth rocket from these South Texas wetlands. After a “draft” of this assessment is published, there will be an approximately 30-day period for public comments. This will be followed by other steps, including a determination by the FAA on whether SpaceX’s proposed environmental mitigations will be enough or if more work is required.

The stacking of the rocket late last week, and the photos released by Musk of that stacking, Berger sees as Musk’s effort to quietly apply pressure on those bureaucrats to get their work done already. As he writes, “Holding back Starship means holding back this progress, Musk wanted regulators to understand.”

Read the whole essay. In addition to illustrating the poltical games required by SpaceX to get past the stifling rules of our modern government, it very nicely shows how America has changed since the early 20th century. Then, no such regulators stood in the way, and Americans were thus about to build fast and with great skill, reshaping the cities of the world forever.

Though I expect the politics of the moment to favor SpaceX, forcing the FAA to get its work done quickly to allow the rocket to take off as planned, this is only going to happen because of the political clout SpaceX has with the public, and thus with politicians. For small companies no such clout exists, and thus expect U.S. innovation to continue to suffer in the coming years because we have given our govenrment too much power over our lives.

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China gives vague hints about its manned lunar lander

10:02 am

According to this Space News article today, China has recently allowed some tantalizing hints become public about its plans to build a manned lunar lander.

The brief news report from Xiamen University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics July 1 (Chinese) names individuals leading projects pertinent to China’s human lunar landing plans and notably refers to the landing project as a “national strategy”.

…The report names Yang Lei as “chief commander of the crewed lunar landing vehicle system” at the China Academy of Space Technology (CAST), a subordinate to the state-owned space and defense contractor China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CASC). Yang was accompanied for the visit to Xiamen University by the project’s deputy chief commander and another involved in CAST’s new-generation crew spacecraft developed for deep space journeys. Other CASC subsidiaries are working on a new human-rated launch vehicle.

No details of the lander were provided during the meeting, in which current progress and future plans for human moon landings were presented. A number of slides were published but were intentionally blurred out.

Such secrecy is not unusual for China. It is one of the reasons it opposes the Artemis Accords, which require a transparancy in plans that China does not wish to give.

The secrecy however suggests that while they have now named the individuals in charge of the project, they have not yet settled on their design for that lander, and are exploring options. Based on long term schedule for lunar exploration that China and Russia have jointly announced, the first manned landings are planned sometime after ’26.

To meet that schedule they need to get moving on building that lander, now. This story suggests they are now gearing up to do that.

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Update on SLS: launch prep continues, launch in 2021 remains doubtful

9:49 am

Link here. The key milestone recently achieved was powering up the core stage with all stages stacked.

The initial power up was a significant milestone in pre-launch processing, marking the beginning of the systematic checkouts of the vehicle and ground systems that will be used for the first launch on Artemis 1.

It continues to appear that NASA and its SLS contractors are striving hard to avoid another delay and get the rocket off on its first unmanned test flight in the November/December timeframe that has been penciled in for the last two years. However, as noted in the article, meeting that deadline will be difficult, and the launch date is still likely to slip into early ’22.

The complexity of the tasks needed to get SLS ready becomes obvious if you read the article. This remains a very cumbersome and difficult rocket to launch. Though the prep this time is greater because it is the first time they are doing it, the assembly for later launches will not be much simpler. At best NASA hopes to trim the prep time from one year to six months.

Compare that with SpaceX’s goals on Starship/Superheavy. It is clear the company is aiming for the ability to prep the rocket and get it to the launchpad in mere days, not months, and by all measures it seems to be achieving that goal.

Even if one ignores the gigantic development cost difference ($50+ billion for SLS, $6 billion for Starship/Superheavy), the difference in getting the two rockets to the launchpad makes SLS the clear loser. How can NASA possibly expect to settle the solar system with a rocket that at best can only launch twice a year?

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Space Force adds three more rocket startups to its rapid launch program

9:35 am

Capitalism in space: The Space Force announced today that it has added the three smallsat rocket companies ABL, Astra, and Relativity to its program, dubbed OSP-4, to develop rockets that can be launched quickly at a moment’s notice.

OSP-4 is an indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract for rapid acquisition of launch services. Vendors compete for individual orders, and have to be able to launch payloads larger than 400 pounds to any orbit within 12 to 24 months from contract award.

The OSP-4 contract vehicle was created in October 2019 and eight companies were selected then: Aevum, Firefly, Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, SpaceX., United Launch Alliance, VOX Space [Virgin Orbit], and X-Bow Launch.

There are now 11 vendors in the program that will compete for 20 missions over the next nine years. OSP-4 is authorized up to $986 million for launch contracts over that period.

Of these eleven companies, five have operational rockets (Northrop Grumman, Rocket Lab, SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, and ULA) and five have announced plans to do their first orbital launch this year (Aevum, ABL, Astra, Relativity, and Firefly), with Astra’s first orbital flight scheduled for later this month. The schedule of the remaining X-Bow remains unknown.

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Starliner launch scrub: 13 of 24 of the capsule’s propulsion valves failed to work

9:23 am

It now appears that the launch scrub last week of Boeing’s Starliner second unmanned demo flight to ISS occurred because thirteen valves in the capsule’s propulsion valves all failed to open during prelaunch testing.

Over the weekend, the team made “positive progress,” a spokesperson said Monday, allowing the company to continue to plan for a launch this month. The company has found “no signs of damage or external corrosion,” Boeing said in a statement Monday. “Test teams are now applying mechanical, electrical and thermal techniques to prompt the valves open.” As a result, more than half of the valves “are now operating as designed,” it said, and work would continue on the others “in the days ahead.”

In a blog post, NASA said that “if all valve functionality can be restored and root cause identified, NASA will work with Boeing to determine a path to flight for the important uncrewed mission to the space station.” The earliest opportunity would come in mid-August, it said.

But Boeing still does not know what caused the valves to remain closed when they needed to be in the open position, and it is unclear how long determining that would take. As a result, some in the aerospace industry are skeptical the company could launch this month.

They have managed to get seven of those thirteen valves working again.

That 13 of 24 failed to function correct strongly suggests the problem isn’t random but is instead a fundamental design problem that needs to be identified prior to launch.

That such a problem has only been discovered now, during the launch countdown, does not reflect well on Boeing or its capsule. That the problem was not noticed in the year and a half delay caused by the software problems during the first unmanned demo flight in December 2019 makes this problem even more disturbing.

In fact, it is downright shocking. It makes one wonder about Boeing’s entire operation, considering the disastrous problems the company has also had with its commercial and military airplane projects in recent years. Does the company have no quality control systems in place, at all?

I truly hope Boeing gets this fixed and Starliner flying, but right now they need to fly a number of times, including reusing a capsule a few times, before I’d recommend anyone buying a ticket.

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Evidence proves lockdowns bad; Democrats scream, “We must have more lockdowns!”

3:55 pm

Modern science!
How Democratic Party policy makers interpret data!

Almost a year and a half since the Wuhan panic swept across the world, the evidence continues to show that the policy decisions by our so-called “intellectual” class of experts to impose mandates and lockdowns were almost all stupid, producing disaster after disaster while completely failing to achieve any of their goals.

First we have Sweden, which refused to impose any lockdowns and now has practically no COVID-19 deaths at all.

An Imperial College model suggested that 85,000 people would die without a lockdown, and an Uppsala University team projected that 40,000 people would die from COVID-19 by May 1, 2020 and nearly 100,000 by June.

But by May, Sweden reported roughly six deaths for every one million people, according to the Financial Times, with 48.9% of its initial coronavirus deaths taking place in nursing homes, according to an analysis by the Swedish Public Health Agency. More than a year later, Sweden recorded 1.1 million coronavirus cases with 1.07 million people having recovered from the virus, and 14,620 coronavirus-linked deaths, according to woldometers.info as of Aug. 8, 2021.

Of the currently 12,248 people who have tested positive for COVID-19, 12, 219 are experiencing mild symptoms (99.8%) and 29 (0.2%) are in serious or critical condition, according to woldometers.info.

In other words, the models were so ridiculously wrong they weren’t even in the same galaxy as the results in the real world. Sweden’s population very quickly reached herd immunity and is now relatively immune from the virus and its later variants.

Moreover, Sweden’s economy has suffered little during the epidemic, and is doing nicely. Not so much in the U.S., where power-hungry politicians with their lockdowns have caused the destruction of 40% of all small businesses.

Nor is Sweden the only data point. A new study of 43 countries as well as all 50 U.S. states has found that lockdowns were worthless.
» Read more

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Peeling thin layers on a Martian plateau

1:22 pm

Peeling thin layers on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on May 14, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what the science team labels as “light-toned layered deposits.”

Their focus, rightly from a geologist’s perspective, is the contrast in color between different layers, suggesting different composition and thus a different formation history for each layer.

To me, what made this feature appealing is the thinness and number of its layers. It reminded me of fillo pastry, “unleavened flour dough formed into very thin sheets or leaves.”

If you look at the full image you will see that cropped section only covers one edge of a tongue-shaped plateau, with similar layers revealed along its entire cliff wall. It is almost like those layers have been peeling off for eons to leave the plateau behind.

The location below gives some context.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: For too many, it ain’t my problem

11:52 am

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Still asleep, and tragically, they refuse to wake up.

Last week I took a break from publishing my daily “Today’s blacklisted American” column. It is without doubt a depressing chore to detail day after day examples where power-hungry thugs smash their jackboots on the faces of innocent people, merely because those innocent people committed the horrible crime of disagreeing with thugs.

I found I needed that break. I also had sensed — from the overall decreasing interest by news aggregate sites in my column — that the news business, even the conservative news business, was becoming bored with these stories.

Worse, I sensed that many readers found these stories distasteful and wished to avoid them. Though I don’t give a rat’s ass that these ostriches (with their heads in the sand) were bothered, it was nonetheless depressing to sense such people existed, and nothing I did could ever penetrate their close-minded brains.

My post announcing this break sadly confirmed my worse fears.
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Hawaiian TMT protesters found not guilty of obstructing the road they obstructed

9:05 am

The law for thee but not for me: An Hawaiian judge has ruled that the protesters of the Thirty Meter Telesecope (TMT) who had obstructed the access road to the top of Mauna Kea are not guilty of obstructing that road.

[I]n announcing her verdict, the judge noted that during the trial, officials testified that the access road was closed and there were no permits issued for oversized vehicles. “Evidence that Mauna Kea access road was closed or restricted to the public, coupled with no permits, equals no obstruction,” Laubach said. “There would be no unreasonable inconvenience or hazard.”

The state failed to meet its burden beyond a reasonable doubt, she said.

This ruling is a joke. The reason the officials closed the road was because the protesters were there. The officials did not want anyone hurt by the oversized trucks that had legal permission to drive through carrying TMT construction equipment.

Such a ruling however is not a surprise. From top to bottom Hawaii’s government in controlled by the Democratic Party. The judge almost certainly was a Democrat. The Democrats favor the bigoted anti-white and anti-technology agenda of the protesters, and have gone out of their way to help them in their protests.

In general, protesters for Democratic Party causes can loot, burn, kill, obstruct traffic, and do all sorts of violent things — including physically attacking women and children in a park in Portland — and are either never arrested, quickly released on dropped charges, or found innocent.

Be a conservative and spend a dozen minutes inside the Capitol Building taking a few selfies, however, and you will find yourself imprisoned for months, with no charges brought and no sign they ever will be brought. You are guilty, and you will be punished. How dare you do anything that opposes the Democratic Party and its storm trooper thugs?

TMT is never going to be built in Hawaii. In fact, I am beginning to doubt it will ever be built anywhere. Considering the increasing difficulty that ground-based astronomy is going to have dealing with the many satellite constellations now being launched, it is very possible the support for the telescope will begin to dry up. And maybe this failure will be a signal to astronomers that they should finally begin spending their money on space-based optical telescopes.

Meanwhile, Hawaii has become a place hostile to science, to new knowledge, and even to tourism. The dark age there has come quite quickly.

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New data suggests Gale Crater was never filled with lake

12:28 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new review of data from Curiosity now suggests that Gale Crater was not filled with a lake in the past — as generally believed — but instead simply had small ponds on its floor.

Previous analyses of data from Curiosity have relied heavily on a measure called the chemical index of alteration to determine how rocks were weathered over time. Joseph Michalski at the University of Hong Kong and his colleagues have suggested that because this measure was developed for use on Earth, it may not be valid in the extreme Martian climate.

Instead, they analysed the concentrations of various compounds that are expected to change based on different types of weathering over time. They found that some of the layers of rock Curiosity examined did interact with water at some point in their past, but more are likely to have formed outside of the water. “Over hundreds of metres of strata, it seems that the only layers that are demonstrably lacustrine [formed in a lake] are the lower few metres,” says Michalski. “Of the rocks visited by the rover… the fraction that is demonstrably lacustrine is something like 1 per cent.”

These rocks were mostly in the lowest few metres of sediments in the crater, suggesting the lake was not nearly as deep or extensive as we thought. “There was likely a small lake or more likely a series of small lakes in the floor of Gale crater, but these were shallow ponds,” says Michalski.

This conclusion also aligns with other recent work proposing that Gale Crater was always cold and never had running water.

None of this is proven, one way or the other, though this new conclusion would make it easier to explain Mars entire geological history. Trying to create models for Mars’ past climate that allowed large amounts of liquid water on its surface have so far been difficult at best, and have generally been unconvincing. Eliminating the need for liquid water will make explaining Mars’ geology much simpler.

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Rocket Lab shifts another launch from Virginia to New Zealand

12:15 pm

Foot-dragging by NASA bureaucrats has apparently forced Rocket Lab to shift the launch of its CAPSTONE lunar orbit cubesat from its new launchpad in Wallops Island, Virgina, to its New Zealand launchpad.

CAPSTONE would be the second Rocket Lab mission in recent weeks that shifted from Virginia to New Zealand. The most recent Electron launch July 26 placed into orbit Monolith, a smallsat developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory. Monolith was originally going to launch on the first Electron mission from Virginia.

Rocket Lab said at the time that it shifted the launch of Monolith because of ongoing work by NASA to certify the software for the rocket’s autonomous flight termination system. A NASA spokesman said in July that the agency expected to complete certification of the unit by the end of the year.

Note too that Rocket Lab had originally hoped to launch from Wallops in 2020, but was forced to delay that launch to 2021 then because of NASA’s inability to approve this system. Now it looks like they won’t be able to launch in ’21 either.

This flight termination system is likely the same one that Rocket Lab has successfully used now for four years and more than twenty launches in New Zealand. Why it should take NASA literally years to approve it is shameful. As I wrote in November,

While I have no evidence of this, I cannot help being suspicious of these various government agencies. For years numerous people in the government put fake roadblocks up to slow or stop SpaceX’s first manned launch, merely because it threatened their turfs. This autonomous termination system will make the ground crews at Vandenberg and at Cape Canaveral irrelevant, and I would not be surprised if some of these issues were drummed up to delay or block this system because of that.

I know I am being cynical, but based on history it is not unreasonable to be so.

I think we are seeing evidence now that my cynicism was entirely justified.

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