Author: Robert Zimmerman

Iridium dumps Russia for SpaceX

10:14 pm

In the heat of competition: Because of Russian red tape Iridium has switched from a Russian rocket to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 for placing its first 10 next generation communications satellites in orbit this year.

I thought the Putin government’s consolidation of its entire aerospace industry into a single corporation was going to speed things up? Not. Then again, SpaceX might not be any better, considering the problems it continues to have meeting its launch schedule.

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Wrapping up the longest space mission by an American

10:09 pm

My how time flies: Astronaut Scott Kelly’s almost year-in-space is scheduled to end on March 1st.

Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko will come back to Earth Tuesday (March 1), wrapping up an unprecedented 340-day stay on the orbiting lab. (Crewmembers typically live and work aboard the station for 5 to 6 months at a time.)

The article is wrong when it calls this mission “unprecedented.” The Russians have flown four astronauts in space for more than a year, with one spending 14.5 months in orbit. Though Kelly’s experience will provide valuable data for future long term missions to the planets, it remains disappointing to me that NASA didn’t have the courage to push this beyond the previous Russian record.

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SpaceX scrubs Falcon 9 launch again

10:01 pm

Update: It appears that they called the launch because of winds, though it also appears that the lower oxidizer temperatures have also reduced their weather margins.

In the heat of competition: For the second day in a row SpaceX has canceled a commercial launch of its Falcon 9 rocket because they were unable to get the oxygen in its tanks as cold as required.

The denser propellant gives the rocket added thrust, contributing to what SpaceX says is a 33 percent overall increase in its performance compared to the previous version.

But during countdowns Wednesday and Thursday, SpaceX reported trouble keeping the “deeply cryogenic” propellant cold enough. Although Thursday’s launch window lasted 96 minutes, it turned out SpaceX really only had one opportunity during that window. If any problem arose, SpaceX said the liquid oxygen would have to be drained and re-loaded, a process that would take too long.

This problem is troubling, suggesting that there might be a more fundamental issue here than they are saying. First, there was the significant delay since the last launch of this upgraded fueling system in December, implying that the data from that launch required some reworking. Now, they have scrubbed two launches in a row because they couldn’t get the oxygen cold enough to properly fuel the rocket. I also wonder if they need to reach a colder temperature in order to get enough fuel loaded to get the satellite to its proper orbit.

I generally trust SpaceX’s engineers to address a problem and fix it. Right now, however, they are under the gun. They need to get this working and begin launching rockets on a more reliable schedule. They have a lot of customers waiting in line.

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Lexington proposes gun confiscation

10:18 am

Fascists: The town of Lexington, Massachusetts, where the American Revolution was started by Minutemen armed with rifles, has proposed confiscating legally owned firearms from its citizens.

One such town meeting member, a Harvard professor named Robert Rotberg has taken it upon himself to enact, what he hopes will be “a movement against assault weapons that would capture the state and therefore maybe explode to reach the country.” He has seized upon the recent ban enacted in Highland Park, IL, and has modeled his own ban, almost copying the language verbatim. Filing it to the town meeting warrant as Article 34.

Among other things, Article 34 includes any firearm that is semi-automatic and can accept a magazine that will hold more than 10 rounds. It also includes any magazine that holds more than 10 rounds. The article also has a provision in which Lexington’s licensed gun owners who own firearms included in the ban would be forced to sell, render inoperable, or have them seized and destroyed by the police department

It doesn’t seem to occur to this Harvard professor that this ordinance would violate both the second amendment (“the right to bear arms shall not be infringed”) and the fifth amendment (“nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation”). But then, who cares about some old document called the Bill of Rights written by some white guys more than 200 years ago? We are Progressives! We know better!

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Successful test of India’s GSLV rocket engine

9:54 am

The competition heats up: India has successfully completed a full duration static hot fire test of the cryogenic engine it is developing for its more powerful GSLV rocket.

The press release is very short and lacking in many details, including any detailed information about the engine being tested. However, this success bodes well for India’s plans to launch a new upgraded GSLV before the end of the year.

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Fraud in many science surveys?

9:37 am

The uncertainty of science: An analysis of scientific surveys suggests that one in five may contain fake data.

With few exceptions, they limited their analysis to studies that asked more than 1000 people at least 75 questions on a range of topics. And to be conservative, they forgave studies for which at least 95% of the data passed the test.

That made the results all the more worrying: Among 1008 surveys, their test flagged 17% as likely to contain a significant portion of fabricated data. For surveys conducted in wealthy westernized nations, that figure drops to 5%, whereas for those done in the developing world it shoots up to 26%.

To me the difference found between first and third world countries makes the results more believable. It suggests that survey companies who do these surveys have a problem that should be addressed. Instead, the research

is being hotly disputed by the Pew Research Center, one of the major funders of such surveys. And the organization has gone so far as to request the researchers desist from publishing their work.

Pew reviewed the questionable surveys and found evidence that the analysis produced some false positives. They used this as reason to reject its results entirely. That the analysis has also been successful in detecting fraud in several surveys apparently does not concern them.

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The moment Yeltsin became a capitalist

10:50 pm

In 1989 Boris Yeltsin, member of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and leader of one of what could be considered the equivalent of one of its mid-western states, visited Texas and toured the Johnson Space Center as well as a typical American supermarket. It was the grocery store that impressed him, not America’s space program.

He was dazzled by the fact that grocery stores were everywhere, and that they even offered free samples. A year or so later, a biographer wrote that on the plane ride from Texas to Florida, Yelstin couldn’t get the vision of the endless food supply out of his mind, and lamented how different things were for his own countrymen. According to wikipedia, Leon Aron, quoting a Yeltsin associate, wrote in his biography, “Yeltsin, A Revolutionary Life” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000): “For a long time, on the plane to Miami, he sat motionless, his head in his hands. ‘What have they done to our poor people?’ he said after a long silence.” He added, “On his return to Moscow, Yeltsin would confess the pain he had felt after the Houston excursion: the ‘pain for all of us, for our country so rich, so talented and so exhausted by incessant experiments.’”

He wrote that Mr. Yeltsin added, “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.”

And then, in his own autobiography, Yeltsin wrote about the experience at the grocery store himself, which reshaped his entire view on communism, ultimately leading to his leaving the Communist party. “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people,” Yeltsin wrote. “That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty! It is terrible to think of it.”

In writing Leaving Earth, I read all these same sources and was struck as well by how much this moment influenced Yeltsin. Very clearly, what Yeltsin saw that day led him to abandon communism.

If only more Americans could experience the same contrast he did, that of the shortages and poverty of top-down, command economies like socialism and communism vs the wealth and vibrancy and freedom of capitalism. I suspect unfortunately they will have to turn the U.S. into a new Soviet Union before they will realize how bankrupt such systems are.

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GAO finds fraud rampant in Obamacare subsidy program

9:23 pm

Finding out what’s in it: A GAO report has found that the Obamacare bureaucracy gave out millions of dollars in subsidies to more than 35,000 applicants who did not qualify.

Worse, the GAO decided to test the system directly, and created twelve fake applicants whose applications had problems that should have prevented them from receiving subsidies The result?

It was able to secure $2,500 a month subsidies for 11 of those applicants. When CMS [the bureaucracy administering Obamacare] asked for documents to resolve inconsistencies in the files, GAO either sent fake documents or simply didn’t send anything. In both cases, CMS sent letters acknowledging receipt of documents and stating the matter had been resolved. Again, this was the case even when GAO had sent nothing in response to the initial CMS query. In the end, GAO was able to keep all 11 fictitious applicants on subsidies throughout 2014, each one directing about $30,000 in federal funds to an insurer under false pretenses. And it’s worth noting that, later on in the report, GAO makes clear it created this fake applicants with no prior or inside knowledge of any verification procedures that might be applied. This was something that anyone could have done.

There’s more at the link, such as the fact that the bureaucracy also decided, quite arbitrarily, to send subsidies to applicants who claimed they were not in prison, even if those applicants were on the official database of individuals in prison (and thus not qualified for subsidies according to the law).

But hey, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and even Donald Trump want to use the government to administer health care. Trump might say he wants to get rid of Obamacare, but he also wants the government to run the system he will create to replace it. What could possibly go wrong?

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LISA Pathfinder cubes in freefall

8:38 pm

After a week of testing scientists have now completely released LISA Pathfinder’s two gold-platinum cubes so that they are floating free within the spacecraft.

With the cubes released, the spacecraft is now measuring the position of each cube and using thrusters to adjust its position and keep the cubes floating within it. This success has essentially proven that the technology works, though they now have to see if the technology can be maintained in orbit for a long enough period of time to be worthwhile. If so, this mission will be followed by multiple similar spacecraft, flying in formation while also measuring their positions precisely relative to each other. If a gravitational wave rolls past, they will detect it by the tiny differences of each cube’s position, kind of like beach balls floating on the ocean as a wave rolls past.

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Cam – Can’t Help Falling In Love

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I’ve posted the original version by Elvis Presley from the movie Blue Hawaii (1961) back in 2013, but this live version,live at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on January 8, 2016, is definitely worth seeing. She dedicated the song to her fiancé, Adam Weaver, and during the performance it is obvious that she is singing directly to him in the audience.

I also dare you to watch it without singing along.

Hat tip Edward Thelen from reminding me that this song needs a revisit.

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The cratered surface of Ceres

5:23 pm

Craters on Ceres

Cool image time! As Dawn continues its survey of Ceres the science team is beginning to release images looking sideways at the planet, rather than straight down, in order to get a better understanding of the topography. The image to the right is an example. It shows the area around 37-mile-wide Fluusa Crater. I have cropped it to emphasize the most rugged areas, especially the jagged cliff meandering away towards the horizon.

This image provides a hint at the differences between Ceres and the Moon. Up until now Dawn images have given the impression that Ceres is very much like the heavily cratered lunar surface. The terrain in this image however suggests to me that Ceres’ surface crust is much less dense because of the low gravity, and thus has a light puffy feel to it. The Moon’s surface is rarely this uneven, as its higher gravity has pounded things down, smoothing them out somewhat.

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SpaceX launch scrubbed

5:02 pm

SpaceX today scrubbed its Falcon 9 launch of a commercial communications satellite about a half hour before launch time.

They have not revealed why they cancelled, though they report the rocket is in good condition and have rescheduled for the same 6:46 pm (Eastern) launch tomorrow.

Update: It appears they had not gotten the rocket’s liquid oxygen as cold as they want. The colder it is, the denser it is, and the more fuel they can pack into the tank.

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No security at Homeland Security

9:44 am

Does this make you feel safer? Homeland Security has lost 165 firearms and more than 1,300 security badges in the past three years.

The people running Homeland Security are generally the same people who want to prevent ordinary citizens from possessing guns. I would say instead that we all would be safer if we owned the guns and they were banned at Homeland Security.

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America’s ten most oppressive colleges

9:31 am

Fascists: A new review of free speech on campuses across the United States has listed the country’s ten most oppressive colleges, with examples of why they earned this odious status.

The first link is the actual report, while the second provides a good quick summary. In either case, the behavior of college officials in attempting to squelch dissent is quite disgusting. Far more horrifying and worrisome for the future were the number of cases where the students themselves moved to stamp down on opposing views. They are the future, and that future does not look pleasant.

Some good news: In South Carolina students are suing their college for interrogating them for daring to hold an event in support of free speech that offended some students.

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El Camino del Rey

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I posted this video of El Camino del Rey (The King’s Road) back in 2010, but when Willi Kusche suggested it I thought, why not post it again? It shows a walk along the crumbling walkway high on the cliff walls of El Chorro canyon in Andalusia, Spain and is not for those with any fear of heights. Considering the craziness we are enduring with this year’s presidential election, I think this hike is relatively mild in comparison.

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University President shuts down speech because it is conservative

11:38 am

Fascist: The president of California State University-Los Angeles (CSULA) has cancelled a speech by a conservative journalist because equal time would not be given to liberal positions.

CSULA president William Covino announced Monday that the event would not be allowed to continue without opposing speakers: “After careful consideration, I have decided that it will be best for our campus community if we reschedule Ben Shapiro’s appearance for a later date, so that we can arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity. Such an event will better represent our university’s dedication to the free exchange of ideas and the value of considering multiple viewpoints.”

As noted by the speaker and the conservative club that asked him to speak, this university president never required left wing speakers to provide air time to conservatives. What he is really doing is coming up with a fake reason to censor conservative thought, merely because he doesn’t like it.

What I like best about this story however is Shapiro’s response. He has said that the event is going on regardless. He is refusing to let them prevent him from expressing his opinions, a right guaranteed by the first amendment.

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Trump threatens private citizens for opposing him

9:08 am

Fascist: Presidential candidate Donald Trump yesterday threatened the owners of the Chicago Cubs because they have been donating to a political action committee that is running campaign ads opposed to his candidacy

His exact words: “I hear the Rickets family, who own the Chicago Cubs, are secretly spending $’s against me. They better be careful, they have a lot to hide!”

As the link above notes,

This follows on him threatening Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) with a lawsuit for running an ad using old footage of him talking about abortion. And that follows on him threatening to sue a reporter who wrote about the failure of the Taj Mahal Casino. All of this has happened within the last four weeks.

I don’t like fascists, whether they are on the left or the right.

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Investment in commercial space zooms

8:29 am

The competition heats up: According to a new report, venture capitalists invested twice as much money last year in commercial space startups than they had in the previous fifteen years combined.

From 2000 through 2015, space startups reeled in $13.3 billion in investment cash, including $2.9 billion in venture capital. A full $1.8 billion—or roughly two-thirds—of that venture capital was invested last year alone. The influx of all that VC cash suggests a shifting perception among investors, Christensen says.

Investment in space-related startups was once largely dominated by “advocacy investors” passionate about space travel (think Elon Musk) and corporations with strategic interests in Earth orbit (telecoms, satellite TV providers, etc.). Now, thanks to a handful of very visible successes from companies like SpaceX, a broader base of investors are looking at space startups as more traditional tech investments—the kind that rapidly bring a product to market and generate revenue in the relatively near term. Those products and revenues generally have less to do with space and more to do with information, Christensen says.

Combine this with the much less significant story yesterday about how NASA received a record 18,000 applicants for a mere 14 astronaut positions and it sure appears that western society is becoming increasingly space happy.

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Toy boat crosses the Atlantic

2:23 pm

A toy boat launched by students in South Carolina has been found by beach-goers in Wales.

The boat had been launched by fourth graders from St Andrews School of Math and Science in Charleston as part of a project to teach students about the ocean. This was in May 2015. The Carolina Dreamer traveled over 6400 kilometers across the pond, making a pit stop in Bermuda along the way.

The students equipped the vessel with a time capsule and GPS tracker before sending it out to sea. Although it lost a sail along the way, the boat transmitted its location 16 kilometers from the town of Aberstwyth, prompting the teacher behind the idea, Amy McMahon, to contact the local marines.

The best part of the story? School officials in Wales are planning to launch the boat back towards the western hemisphere.

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Virgin Galactic unveils new SpaceShipTwo

10:08 pm

The competition heats up: On Friday Virgin Galactic unveiled their replacement SpaceShipTwo, dubbed Unity, replacing the first ship destroyed 16 months ago during a failed flight test.

As is typical of Virgin Galactic, they managed to garner a lot of press coverage of this event. To me, it is a big big yawn. I want to see this ship flying, not towed out from a hanger by an SUV with Richard Branson waving to the crowd.

And until they do, I will consider everything Virgin Galactic does at this point to me nothing more than empty public relations bull.

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The Obama-like promises of Trump

10:52 am

During an interview on CNN yesterday, Donald Trump was asked about Obamacare and the insurance mandate. The first words out of his mouth were “I like the mandate,” which is what most conservative websites are focusing on.

I think it is more important to focus on Trump’s entire answer, which goes on for about two and half minutes. (I have posted the video below the fold, so you can listen for yourself.) As noted at the first link above,

Trump doesn’t have a freakin clue as to what he’s talking about. What he’s obviously done is extract a few focus group tested themes, like “dying on the street,” and “get rid of the lines,” and he simply says these over and over with connecting verbiage. The plan Trump refers to, the one that apparently suspends the idea of supply and demand and guarantees everyone a free lunch, simply does not exist. In the tech field it is a concept known as vaporware.

During Trump’s answer, he notes the dishonesty of Obama for making wild promises about Obamacare that were outright lies (‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan. Period.” and “Obamacare will cut costs by $2500 per family.”). Trump then proceeds to spout his own wild and unrealistic promises about what he will do about healthcare when he is President. And they sound to me as dishonest and incoherent as the promises Obama made. Both set of promises remind me of school elections when I was in junior high school, where candidates would promise free ice cream at every break and soda machines in the halls. Such promises are silly, childish, and unrealistic, and the voters should try to be mature enough to see that.

Trump might be a better choice than Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, but for Republicans to pick him as their nominee is insane. We can certainly do better.
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A frozen underground ocean on Charon?

8:49 pm

Data from New Horizons of the surface of Pluto’s moon Charon now suggests that the satellite once had an underground ocean that is now frozen.

Charon’s outer layer is primarily water ice. When the moon was young this layer was warmed by the decay of radioactive elements, as well as Charon’s own internal heat of formation. Scientists say Charon could have been warm enough to cause the water ice to melt deep down, creating a subsurface ocean. But as Charon cooled over time, this ocean would have frozen and expanded (as happens when water freezes), pushing the surface outward and producing the massive chasms we see today.

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