Author: Robert Zimmerman

Update on the LDSD partly successful test flight

11:52 am

Another eleven news stories were published today on the LDSD test flight (go here to find them all), but only two gave an honest and informative appraisal of the parachute failure and the program’s future. This CBS report clarified the results well with these two quotes:

The Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator then fell toward impact in the Pacific Ocean northwest of Hawaii. The carrier balloon apparently came apart after the LDSD’s release and it was not immediately clear what recovery crews standing by in the landing zone might be able to retrieve.

and this:

Two more LDSD vehicles are being built for “flights of record” next summer.

Another report from Space Insider also provided this key information, something I would have expected every journalist in the world to have considered essential to their report.

Sadly, not one of the other news stories saw fit to mention that the test vehicle might have been destroyed because of the failure of the chute, nor did any of them bother to report that two more such test vehicles are under construction, allowing program to continue anyway.

That so many news stories were published on this test flight indicates the interest that exists in it. Too bad most reporters writing these stories were only interested in providing us propaganda and pro-NASA cheer-leading.

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South Pole ice cap sets new record

11:26 am

The uncertainty of science: The Antarctic ice cap set a record for size this past week.

The sea ice coverage around Antarctica over the weekend marked a record high, with the ice surrounding the continent measuring at 2.07 million square kilometers, according to an environmentalist and author who says the ice there has actually been increasing since 1979 despite continued warnings of global warming.

The article notes how global warming climate scientists conveniently insist that the growing south pole ice cap and the extended cold temperatures there are irrelevant to their theirs. A real scientist, however, would dismiss no data, as to do so skews the results.

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Another legal case that could blow the IRS open

12:44 am

The lawsuit of a pro-Israeli organization, filed in August 2010, makes the IRS extremely vulnerable to deep legal investigation.

[Y]esterday saw the beginning of the discovery phase in the lawsuit by Z-Street a pro-Israel organization that was told its application for tax exempt status was being delayed because “…these cases are being sent to a special unit in the DC office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” …
Judge Jackson gave the IRS until June 26 to respond to Z-Street. That deadline has now passed, so the case enters discovery. This means that Z-Street can subpoena IRS officials, place them under oath, and ask them questions about how they acted, and cross examine them closely. They can also subpoena documents and require their production. This is much different than a House committee hearing in which members have only a few minutes to ask questions, and when friendly Democrats have their opportunity to apologize for the impertinence of daring to ask questions of our IRS masters. Depositions taken under oath can last many hours and involve detailed questions.

What makes the Z-Street case unique and potentially extremely damaging is that its lawsuit was filed in August 2010. That filing placed the IRS under legal obligation to preserve records.

As the article notes, as a legal proceeding it will be practically impossible for the IRS to stonewall, as it has done during Congressional hearings. Like the Judicial Watch case that will have a hearing on July 10, the IRS was required under the law to make sure evidence was not destroyed, and failed to do so. And like that case, the court will have the right to demand answers about that failure and get them.

I want to underline the basis of the Z-Street case: An IRS official admitted that this organization’s tax exempt status was being delayed merely because its “activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Think about that. The IRS believes it can decide your tax liability and status based on your political opinion.

Doesn’t that capture in a nutshell the entire scandal, in which the IRS was used as a weapon to harass opponents of the Democratic Party and specifically of Barack Obama.

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First test flight of Angara is officially postponed

9:10 pm

It’s official: The first flight of Angara has been postponed for at least a week or more.

“The rocket will be removed from the launchpad and transferred to a technical stand for comprehensive analysis,” RIA quoted the Khrunichev center as saying, adding the new launch time would only be decided after the checks.

Though no information was released that describes the cause of the scrub, that they are going to give the rocket a major look-over suggests that at least one of the problems reported by Anthony Zak at Russianspaceweb are likely true. To quote him again:

According to a veteran of Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Russian space historian Vladimir Antipov, the scrub at that moment could indicate a failure in the pneumatic and hydraulic system activating the rocket’s propulsion system. A screenshot of the launch countdown clock, which had surfaced on the Internet, indicated a scrub at T-1 minute 19.7 seconds. It then transpired that the loss of pressure in a flexible gas line of the propulsion system caused the delay.

It could take as long as a week to fix the problem, industry sources said on the Novosti Kosmonavtiki web forum. GKNPTs Khrunichev, the Angara’s manufacturer then posted a one-line press-release saying that the date of the next launch attempt would be announced later.

According to other sources, a valve on the oxidizer line failed, which could require to return the rocket to the assembly building, to cut out the device and weld in the new valve. Due to a built-in nature of the valve, the return of the rocket to the manufacturing plant in Moscow could also be required, likely postponing the mission for weeks.

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A flawed first flight for NASA’s saucer for testing Mars landing techniques.

9:02 pm

NASA’s Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD), the saucer shaped system for testing new landing techniques on Mars, did its first flight today with mixed results.

A saucer-shaped NASA vehicle testing new technology for Mars landings rocketed high over the Pacific on Saturday and deployed a novel inflatable braking system, but its massive parachute failed to fully unfurl as it descended to a splashdown. Control room cheers that greeted successful steps in the complex test rapidly died as the parachute appeared to emerge tangled. “Please inform the recovery director we have bad chute,” a mission official ordered.

I have found two other stories on this test flight, one from nasaspaceflight and the second from reuters. Both the Huffington Post story above and these two fail entirely to tell us whether the test vehicle was damaged when its parachute failed to open and it hit the water. Worse, all three articles seem to ignore this significant detail in describing enthusiastically NASA’s future plans for the LDSD.

As a reader, I instead think: NASA’s future plans are not the story now. The story is whether this program can even continue.

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Things could get very interesting for the IRS on July 10.

11:46 pm

The judge with whom the IRS failed to notify about the lost emails and is holding a hearing on the matter on July 10 has in the past aggressively pursued corruption in the Department of Justice.

Judge Sullivan is the judge who held federal prosecutors in contempt, dismissed an unjust indictment against a United States Senator, and publicly excoriated the Department of Justice. He also had the moral conviction, courage and gumption to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Justice Department and the individual prosecutors. …

In the [Senator Ted] Stevens case, Judge Sullivan publicly upbraided the government lawyers before an overflow courtroom, “In nearly 25 years on the bench, I’ve never seen anything approaching the mishandling and misconduct that I’ve seen in this case. . . . When the government does not meet its obligations to turn over evidence, the system falters.”

Judge Sullivan was taking the extraordinary step of appointing a special prosecutor. He chose highly respected DC attorney Henry Schuelke III to investigate the prosecutors for possible criminal charges. The judge ordered the department to preserve all of its files, electronic correspondence—everything—and cooperate fully in the investigation, including providing Schuelke access to investigative files and all witnesses.

It is very possible Sullivan will get as incensed on July 10. Stay tuned. Things could get very hot for the IRS and the Obama administration on that day.

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IRS also failed to tell court about lost emails

6:17 pm

Cover-up: Even though the IRS knew it had lost a significant chunk of Lois Lerner emails in February, it failed to notify the court even as it released in April emails demanded of them as part of a court case.

No mention was made in that production of the lost Lerner emails, even though the original Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit filed in May 2013 specifically sought them.

Judicial Watch further noted that “although IRS had knowledge of the missing Lois Lerner emails and of the other IRS officials, it materially omitted any mention of the missing records” in an April 30 status update on its document production. … The tax agency could also face court sanctions or even criminal proceedings if [the judge in the case] is not satisfied with the government’s explanation. [emphasis mine]

The IRS and the officials there should be punished criminally for this behavior, but I doubt it will happen.

And then there’s this: According to the law, the loss of the emails of Lerner and other IRS officials can be inferred as evidence that the emails were incriminating.

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An contract extension from NASA for SpaceX and Sierra Nevada

3:18 pm

NASA has given SpaceX and Sierra Nevada six additional months, until March 2015, to complete their last contractual milestones for building their manned spacecraft.

An amendment signed by William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s associate administrator for human exploration and operations, on May 16 gives SpaceX until March 31, 2015, to complete the 14th and final milestone under its $440 million CCiCap agreement — a pad abort test of its Dragon capsule. The test originally was planned for April 2014.

On May 19, Gerstenmaier signed a similar amendment to Sierra Nevada’s $212.5 million CCiCap award to extend work associated with flight tests of the company’s Dream Chaser engineering test article until March 31, 2015.

NASA’s third Commercial Crew partner, Boeing, is on track to complete all its milestones, worth a combined $460 million, by the end of August,

The significance of this extension is that it reveals something about the dates for both SpaceX and Sierra Nevada’s next flight tests. The previously date for the pad abort test for Dragon had most recently been set for this summer. They are obviously not meeting that schedule and need more time. Sierra Nevada meanwhile wants to fly its Dream Chaser test vehicle some more, but apparently needs time to get it flight ready after it sustained damage during landing on its one and only flight test.

In addition, this extension suggests something about NASA’s assessment of the efforts of all three companies. The agency is supposed to down select to two companies by the end of the summer. The extension suggests that they are hoping to keep all three companies funded so that they all build their spacecraft.

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Communications to be lost with the Stereo spacecraft

9:53 am

Communications with the two solar-observing Stereo spacecraft will be cut off for more than a year, far longer than originally expected, as their orbits move them behind the Sun.

Unexpectedly high temperatures in the high gain antenna feed horns on both STEREO spacecraft will require corrective action in the coming months that will severely limit science operations. The high temperatures are being caused by the small angle between Earth and the Sun as seen from each spacecraft. In other words, pointing the antenna at Earth is putting too much solar heat on the antenna feed horn. To bring down the feed horn temperature, and preserve the spacecraft for years to come, the antennas will be pointed off at an angle from both Earth and the Sun, so that less heat will fall on the feed horns. Communication will still be possible using one of the antenna side lobes, but the telemetry rate will be extremely low. What instrument operations can be supported while the antennas are off-pointed is still being studied.

The spacecrafts’ orbit allows them to observe the back side of the Sun not visible from Earth. Though engineers had expected to lose communications for a period of time when the Sun moved between the spacecraft and the Earth, the blacked out time period has turned out to be much longer than planned. The shutdown will begin later this year with communications not resuming until January 2016.

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Let citizens sue government workers directly for misconduct.

9:31 am

Let citizens sue government workers directly for misconduct.

The way to control this epidemic of government law-breaking is to allow citizen victims to sue, and legislate personally liability for bureaucrats guilty of willfully illegal conduct.

I agree. If a government bureaucrat breaks the law and no one in the government does anything about it, allowing them to get off without punishment, then the American citizen who was harmed by that illegal activity should have the right to sue that bureaucrat directly. This is how the law applies in every other venue of society. Why should government workers be exempt from the liability of their actions?

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Sudanese woman flees to U.S. embassy.

9:11 am

Meriam Ibrahim, the Sudanese woman who had been sentenced to death for being a Christian, has gained refuge in the U.S. embassy while she and her family attempt to immigrate to the U.S.

It appears she was getting a lot of death threats, which in any Islamic country must be taken very seriously. Moreover from the details in this story it appears that Sudanese society is very much in favor of killing her, and it is only because of international pressure on the Sudanese government that she has not been so far been murdered, either by the government there or a mob.

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Angara launch scrubbed.

8:41 am

Only moments prior to launch computers aborted the first flight of Angara, Russia’s first new rocket since the Soviet-era.

More information here. According to a Russian web forum, the problem is probably a leaky valve or the loss of pressure in the propulsion system and that it might take a week to be fixed.

The quote below from the first story above is interesting in that it once again illustrates how Putin is trying to exert his authority over the space industry to re-establish the Soviet-era top down way of doing things:

Putin, who had been poised to watch the rocket’s inaugural flight from the northern military Plesetsk cosmodrome via video link from the Kremlin, ordered his generals to report on the cause of the delay within an hour.

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$4.4 billion for 2,000 IRS hard drive crashes.

5:40 pm

After spending $4.4 billion on its computers during the Obama administration, the IRS still had over 2,000 hard drive crashes in 2014.

IRS commissioner John Koskinen used the 2,000 crashes as an argument that the crash of Lois Lerner’s hard drive was not that unusual, and that their aging equipment made backup difficult. To me, it suggests that the people at this agency are either gross incompetents, or even more corrupt than I thought.

Because you see, with that many crashes, the IRS made the one obvious decision anyone with any brains would immediately make in that situation: They canceled the contract with their email backup service.

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More evidence of data tampering at NOAA

2:47 pm

A close analysis of NOAA climate data from just one randomly picked Texas rural location reveals significant data tampering to make the climate appear to be growing warming.

In other words, the adjustments have added an astonishing 1.35C to the annual temperature for 2013. Note also that I have included the same figures for 1934, which show that the adjustment has reduced temperatures that year by 0.91C. So, the net effect of the adjustments between 1934 and 2013 has been to add 2.26C of warming. ,,,

So what possible justification can USHCN [the climate data center at NOAA] have for making such large adjustments? Their usual answer is TOBS, or Time of Observation Bias, which arises because temperatures are now monitored in the early morning rather than the late afternoon, which tended to be the practice before. But by their own admittance, TOBS adjustments should only account for about 0.2C.

What about station location? Has this changed? Well, not since 1949 according to the official Station Metadata. Luling is a small town of about 5000 people, and the station is situated at the Foundation Farm, 0.7 miles outside town. In other words, a fairly rural site, that should not need adjusting for urban influences.

It is plain that these adjustments made are not justifiable in any way. It is also clear that the number of “Estimated” measurements made are not justified either, as the real data is there, present and correct.

In doing this analysis, the author, Paul Homewood, does something that Steven Goddard of the Real Science website, the man who broke this story, doesn’t do very often: He carefully illustrates the full raw dataset and shows us how he isolates the raw data from the estimated and adjusted numbers. Goddard generally only shows his results, which means we have to trust his analysis. Homewood therefore approaches Goddard’s results skeptically, and thus acts to check his work to see if it is accurate and correct. He finds that it is.

This is science at its best.

I should also note that I found Homewood’s analysis because Steven Goddard posted a link on his own webpage. As a true scientist, Goddard does not fear a close look at his work. He welcomes it.

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Blacklisting “disruptive” vets from medical care.

10:18 am

We’re here to help you! The Veterans administration keeps a database administrated by secret committees that lists vets as “disruptive” and “disgruntled,” which it then uses to restrict their treatment.

Among examples of patients’ behavior referred to the VA’s “Disruptive Behavior Committees” (yes, that’s what they’re called): venting “frustration about VA services and/or wait times, threatening lawsuits or to have people fired, and frequent unwarranted visits to the emergency department or telephone calls to facility staff.”

As Krause explains, the Disruptive Behavior Committees are secret panels “that decide whether or not to flag veterans without providing due process first. The veteran then has his or her right of access to care restricted without prior notice.”

Obviously, the VA demonstrates once again why we must put the entire healthcare industry under government control. If they can do it to vets, why shouldn’t the rest of the government not have the power to do it to us all!

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Another global warming computer model bites the dust.

9:59 am

The uncertainty of science: Despite predicting ten years ago that the global temperature would rise significantly, actual temperatures have dropped in the ensuing decade.

But don’t worry, these climate scientists really do know what’s going to happen. Just give them lots of money, silence their critics, and they guarantee they will fake the data to make sure their predictions are right!

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Supreme Court rejects abortion clinic free speech buffer zone.

9:47 am

In another victory against government overreach, the Supreme Court today ruled that a buffer zone protecting abortion clincs from protests violates the first amendment.

While the court was unanimous in the outcome, Roberts joined with the four liberal justices to strike down the buffer zone on narrow grounds. In a separate opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia criticized Roberts’ opinion for carrying forward “this court’s practice of giving abortion-rights advocates a pass when it comes to suppressing the free-speech rights of their opponents.”

I am once again gratified that the entire court recognized the unconstitutionality of this buffer zone. However, Scalia is right. That a majority of the court rejected the buffer on narrow grounds is unfortunate.

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Supreme Court rejects Obama’s recess appointments

9:41 am

The law is such an inconvenient thing: In a 9-0 ruling, the Supreme Court has decided that Barack Obama’s fake recess appointments were unconstitutional.

Two and one-half years ago in 2012, Obama tried to slip-in appointments to the National Labor Relations Board without the constitutionally required Senate approval, claiming he had the right to do so because the Senate was in recess. There’s only one problem. The Senate was not in formal recess when Obama made the dictatorial appointments.

Now the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in a unanimous 9-0 decision that Obama doesn’t get to define when the U.S. Senate is in recess, the Senate does.

I am gratified that all the Democratic appointees to the court ruled against Obama, refusing to allow their partisan tendencies to overrule the plain language of the Constitution. More information about the ruling and its history here.

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Using bath salts to make solar cells

9:27 am

Engineers have discovered they can replace a toxic material used to manufacture one type of solar cell with simple bath salts.

The chemical used is also used to make tofu. It costs far less to buy, and its benign nature means it also costs far less to use as well. This could significantly lower the cost for making these solar cells, though two companies quoted in the article seemed skeptical.

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A trio of supermassive black holes

9:20 am

Astronomers have discovered a trinary of supermassive black holes at the center of a distant collision of multiple galaxies.

Astronomer Roger Deane of the University of Cape Town in South Africa and his colleagues have been watching a particular quasar, known as SDSS J1502+1115, in the constellation Boötes. Other astronomers had found that the object, located 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, possessed two supermassive black holes, each the center of a large galaxy smashing into another. The black holes are at least 24,000 light-years apart.

Deane wanted to confirm their existence, so he used an intercontinental array of radio dishes that yields even sharper views than the Hubble Space Telescope. Lo and behold, one of the black holes turned out to be two. “We were incredibly surprised,” says Deane, whose team reports its findings online today in Nature.

While the discovery of this system is incredibly cool, this article in the journal Science is surprisingly incorrect on some points, while also missing the main story.
» Read more

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Comparing the rocket vs balloon space tourism ride.

8:59 am

The competition heats up: Yahoo today published a 5 point comparison between a ride on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo and Worldview’s Voyager balloon.

The winner, Virgin Galactic, but by a nose. As the story notes, Worldview is the better buy. “You can use the money you save for a nice vacation on Earth — where you can make new friends by telling stores about that time you went to space.”

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China heads for the Moon and Mars.

8:43 am

The competition heats up: In several different news stories today China touted its future plans in space.

The landing test described in the first story above will also be the first test flight of China’s new heavy lift rocket, Long March 5.

That China is both politically and culturally serious about this effort can be seen by the nationalistic enthusiasm for this space effort that permeates these stories. They also can’t help comparing their plans to U.S. efforts.
» Read more

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