Author: Robert Zimmerman

Rosetta gets the go to descend to six miles

8:42 am

After spending a week circling Comet 67P/C-G at a distance of about 12 miles, engineers have now decided they can move Rosetta in to only six miles.

A series of manoeuvres will reduce Rosetta’s distance from its current 18.6 km orbit (taking 7 days) to an intermediate orbit approximately 18.6 x 9.8 km (with a period of about 5 days). From there the orbit will be circularised at about 9.8 km radius, with a period of approximately 66 hours on 15 October, and the mission will enter the “Close Observation Phase” (COP). This will provide even higher resolution images of the landing site in order to best prepare for Philae’s challenging touch-down. The new orbit will also allow a number of Rosetta’s science instruments to collect dust and measure the composition of gases closer to the nucleus.

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Independent Arianespace investigation cites design error as cause of Russian launch failure

8:36 am

A just released independent investigation by Arianespace of the Soyuz rocket launch failure that put two European Galileo GPS satellites in the wrong orbits has concluded that the design of the Fregat upper stage, not an assembly error, was at fault for the failure.

The upper stage was not oriented correctly because fuel lines to thrusters had become frozen.

The freezing resulted from the proximity of hydrazine and cold helium feed lines, these lines being connected by the same support structure, which acted as a thermal bridge. Ambiguities in the design documents allowed the installation of this type of thermal “bridge” between the two lines. In fact, such bridges have also been seen on other Fregat stages now under production at NPO Lavochkin. The design ambiguity is the result of not taking into account the relevant thermal transfers during the thermal analyses of the stage system design.

That the Russian investigation found that this arrangement of feed lines happened once in every four stages that were assembled still suggests sloppiness, if not in assembly then in design. The Arianespace investigation, though thorough, thus appears to me to be trying to provide cover for thier Russian partners here.

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XCOR sells its Lynx suborbital spaceplane

10:19 pm

This NBC story tries very hard to help XCOR sell its Lynx suborbital space plane, but I found myself very unimpressed. To me the images suggested instead that little progress has occurred in recent months, and that the project has stalled.

I hope I am wrong, but this whole story reminded me strongly of many of Richard Branson’s efforts to sell Virgin Galactic, which have so far proven to be vastly overstated.

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Successful American spacewalk today on ISS

9:55 pm

Two American astronauts today successfully completed the first American spacewalk this year on ISS.

The spacewalk, known as US EVA-27, was originally slated to occur in August, but was postponed due to concerns with the batteries in the Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuits, which necessitated a delay while new Long Life Batteries (LLBs) were launched to the ISS aboard the recent CRS-4 Dragon and the Soyuz TMA-14M/40S on September 25, and subsequently installed into the suits.

The work done was mostly clean-up in preparation for a series of future spacewalks to reconfigure the American sections of ISS so that it can allow docking of two private manned capsules as well as two private cargo freighters.

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Nobel Prize goes to blue LED light inventors

9:32 pm

Three scientists share the Nobel physics prize for inventing blue LED lights.

The prize goes jointly to Isamu Akasaki of Meijo University in Nagoya, Japan, Hiroshi Amano of Nagoya University in Japan, and Shuji Nakamura of the University of California, Santa Barbara. Starting in the 1990s they produced blue LEDs, an energy-efficient, environmentally friendly source of blue light, which could be mixed with LEDs of other colors to produce what the eye sees as white light. “I am very honored to receive the Nobel Prize from The Royal Swedish Academy of Science for my invention of the blue LED,” said Nakamura in a statement. “It is very satisfying to see that my dream of LED lighting has become a reality. I hope that energy-efficient LED light bulbs will help reduce energy use and lower the cost of lighting worldwide.”

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The next wave of Obamacare insurance cancellations begin arriving

4:20 pm

Finding out what’s in it: Walmart is dropping health insurance for its part time workers because of Obamacare.

Starting Jan. 1, Wal-Mart told The Associated Press that it will no longer offer health insurance to employees who work less than an average of 30 hours a week. The move, which would affect 30,000 employees, follows similar decisions by Target, Home Depot and others to eliminate health insurance benefits for part-time employees.

This is only a sampling of what is beginning to happen throughout private industry. If companies aren’t cutting hours to less than 30 for many employees so they don’t have to provide Obamacare, they are cutting their total staff to less than 50 to exempt themselves from the law. And they are doing it not because they want to but because they have to. If they don’t, the cost of Obamacare will bankrupt them.

Of course, it is also bankrupting the individuals who now have to find their own insurance and quickly find they can’t afford health insurance as offered by Obamacare.

But remember, the Democrats and Obama care! So what they are idiots and wrote a law that does nothing but harm. We must vote for them anyway because they care!

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The deep ocean is not where global warming has gone

5:26 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new NASA study finds that the deep oceans have not warmed since 2005, striking dead one of the favorite theories of global warming advocates to explain the 18 year stall in global warming.

In the 21st century, greenhouse gases have continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, just as they did in the 20th century, but global average surface air temperatures have stopped rising in tandem with the gases. The temperature of the top half of the world’s oceans — above the 1.24-mile mark — is still climbing, but not fast enough to account for the stalled air temperatures.

Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.

“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”

The bottom line: no one really knows what is going on, climate scientists still do not have a good handle on how the climate works, the science is not “settled”, and anyone who says it is is a liar.

 

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SpaceX wins safety design award

4:52 pm

I post this story about SpaceX winning an award for its safety-in-design work mostly to illustrate again that, except for one lone commenter on my webpage, most of the aerospace industry recognizes the generally good work that SpaceX has been doing. Not only do their recognize it, they have found themselves struggling to meet the competitive challenge that SpaceX now represents, an effort that has been all to the good for everyone in the space industry.

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Reality bites liberal Texas judge

10:09 pm

The Texas judge who visited the infected apartment of America’s first ebola victim without protection has now had a complaint filed against him for endangering his own 9-year-old daughter.

The concerned citizen reached out to Breitbart Texas in a phone interview and provided information about his complaint to [Child Protective Services]. He told Brietbart Texas he wanted to remain anonymous because he is a business owner and is concerned about retaliation. He said he felt Jenkins’ conduct was inappropriate and unnecessarily exposed his child to potential danger. “I am doing this because I am concerned about the child,” the complainant said, “and I am concerned for the children in her school who might become exposed if the virus were to spread.”

Read the article at the link. The risks to the judge’s family and their acquaintances are real. Moreover, there is evidence that the judge has spent considerable time in contact with infected locations and individuals, without protection.

But he cares! That absolves him of any guilt should his actions causes others to die!

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The stall in global warming is now more than half the satellite record

7:21 pm

The uncertainty of science: There has now been no global warming for 18 years, a time period that is more than half the entire satellite temperature record.

The Great Pause is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for a little over half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration. …

The length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed.

If you click on the link you will see quotes from one global warming scientist who, rather than honestly deal with the conflict between theory and data, instead uses name-calling as an argument. He unfortunately is the rule, not the exception.

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Some reasons to panic, part 2

11:13 pm

Left wing fantasies meet the real world: Apropos my previous post about the refusal of the modern intellectual liberal elite to face reality, on Thursday a liberal Democrat Texas judge and two assistants entered the Ebola-infected apartment of America’s first Ebola patient without any protection.

Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins shocked the local press corps Thursday night when he and two female workers entered the apartment where America’s first Ebola patient was staying. He entered without any visible protection from possible exposure to the deadly virus. Judge Jenkins entered the apartment to speak with the occupants who are now being held inside their home under a protection order requiring their compliance. He and two unknown women entered and were not visibly wearing gloves or any kind of mask or other form of protection from the virus.

This idiot and his assistants are now wandering around Dallas, shaking hands at political rallies and possibly spreading the disease far and wide. But it is all okay because he cares for these poor infected blacks and wants to help them. And if you die because of his actions it will only be because you are a raaaaaacist!

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Some reasons to panic

7:45 pm

And those reasons have less to do with actual problems and more to do with the incompetence of our culture’s intellectual leadership.

Over the last few years the divergence between what the government promises and what it delivers, between what it says is happening or will happen and what actually is happening and does happen, between what it determines to be important and what the public wishes to be important—this gap has become abysmal, unavoidable, inescapable. We hear of “lone-wolf” terrorism, of “workplace violence,” that if you like your plan you can keep your plan. We are told that Benghazi was a spontaneous demonstration, that al Qaeda is on the run, that the border is secure as it has ever been, that Assad must go, that I didn’t draw a red line, the world drew a red line, that the IRS targeting of Tea Party groups involved not a smidgen of corruption, that the Islamic State is not Islamic. We see the government spend billions on websites that do not function, and the VA consign patients to death by waiting list and then cover it up. We are assured that Putin won’t invade; that the Islamic State is the jayvee team of terrorism; that Bowe Bergdahl served with honor and distinction; that there is a ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia.

While the public remains pro-Israel, our government negotiates with Israel’s enemies. While the public wants to reduce immigration, the preeminent legislative objective of both parties is a bill that would increase it. While the public is uninterested in global warming, while costly regulations could not pass a filibuster-proof Democratic Senate, while the scientific consensus behind the green agenda is, at the very least, fraying, the president says that climate change is the greatest threat to the United States. While Americans tell pollsters their economic situation has not improved, and that things are headed in the wrong direction—while even Democratic economists acknowledge the despondent state of the middle class—the president travels to Chicago to celebrate his economic recovery.

These disjunctions and confusions, these missteps, scandals, and miscalculations, have hurt Obama’s approval numbers. They endanger the Democratic Senate majority, contribute to the widespread sense of disorder and decay, shatter trust in government and in public institutions. They have put into stark relief a political class dominated by liberal partisans, captured by ideas and interests removed from those of ordinary Americans. The stories of ineptitude or malfeasance that appear in the daily newspaper are more than examples of high ideals executed poorly. They are examples of the pursuit of ideas—of equality and diversity and progress and centralization and environmentalism and globalization—to absurd and self-destructive limits. [emphasis mine]

Read the whole essay, as I couldn’t have said it better. The incompetence of our intellectual partisan liberal elite, more consumed with pie-in-the-sky leftwing agendas than the real world around them, has become downright frightening. The sooner the general public rejects them, wholly and completely, illustrated by a landslide election, the sooner our society can get back to the business of dealing with the increasingly deadly problems of the real world.

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The day fascism rushed through the door in Wisconsin

9:28 am

And I call it fascism because that is what it is, the misuse of government force by members of one political party, the Democrats, to harass and destroy the lives of citizens who happen to disagree with them about policy.

“Houses were surrounded and lit up,” O’Keefe said. “Children and spouses were home in multiple cases, and made to suffer through two-and-a-half-hour raiding parties going through all paper files and seizing computers and phones. Children in multiple cases were told they could not inform their schools why they were late.”

After investigators stormed into their homes and rooted through their possessions, the conservative targets and their families suffered the additional insult of the gag order, O’Keefe said. “So a traumatic event is imposed on entire families, and they are told to suck it up, don’t talk to your friends, relatives, ministers, colleagues,” O’Keefe said. “Don’t explain the deputies’ cars, the boxes they took from your house. Don’t allow your children to tell the truth.”

Once again, the only reason these SWAT team searches were done was because the citizens under attack happened to oppose the politics of the propsecutor who ordered them. And if he could have arrested these citizens without trial, I firmly believe he would have.

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Homeland Security settles lawsuit of reporter whose home they illegally searched

7:06 pm

In a lawsuit settlement Homeland Security has agreed to pay $50,000 and promise to return everything they seized — including confidential files and paperwork that identified Homeland Security whistleblowers –during an illegal raid of a reporter’s home.

Audrey Hudson, an award-winning journalist most recently at the Washington Times, told The Daily Signal she was awoken by her barking dog around 4:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, 2013, to discover armed government agents had descended on her property under the cover of darkness. The agents had a search warrant for her husband’s firearms. As they scoured the home, Hudson was read her Miranda rights.

While inside Hudson’s house, a U.S. Coast Guard agent confiscated documents that contained “confidential notes, draft articles, and other newsgathering materials” that Hudson never intended for anyone else to see. The documents included the identities of whistleblowers at the Department of Homeland Security. The Coast Guard is part of Homeland Security.

The settlement requires the government to return all documents, destroy all notes made from these papers, and promise it did not copy anything. Does anyone believe this?

Posted from Sedona, Arizona, where Diane and I will be for the next week.

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More IRS hard drives wiped to conceal evidence

10:42 am

Looks like a pattern to me: In a different legal case separate from its harassment of conservatives, the IRS has been accused of wiping more hard drives and destroying more evidence.

In its latest court filing, NetJets claims the IRS has been concealing evidence. Its lawyers say the computers of three key IRS employees were wiped clean, including the computer of “an excise-tax policy manager and a key decision maker regarding the application of the section 4261 ticket tax to whole and fractional aircraft-management companies.”

While the harassment of conservatives was a poltical act apparently instigated by the White House, this case has more to do with IRS managers interpreting the tax code, possibly improperly, so as to squeeze as much money from an American company as possible. That it is also possible that they were also willing to destroy evidence suggests a rampant corrupt culture that needs a major house-cleaning.

We can hope the next Congress will force this house-cleaning after the November election.

Posted on the road passig through Phoenix.

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Delta 4 Heavy moved to launchpad for Orion flight

10:09 am

In preparation for a December test flight of the first Orion capsule, the Delta 4 Heavy rocket has been positioned on the launchpad.

The unmanned Dec. 4 mission, known as Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1), is designed to test out Orion’s critical crew-safety systems, such as its thermal-protection gear. During the four-hour flight, the Orion capsule will fly 3,600 miles (5,800 kilometers) from Earth, then come speeding back into the planet’s atmosphere at about 20,000 mph (32,190 km/h) before splashing down softly in the Pacific Ocean, NASA officials said.

Forgive me if I remain decidedly unexcited. I still believe SLS to be an enormous waste of resources that would be better spent onother things.

Posted on the road south of Phoenix.

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Another moon for Earth

9:57 am

Astronomers have discovered an asteroid whose solar orbit is almost identical to Earth’s, and has it hovering so near the Earth that it is almost another moon.

Based on orbital data the scientists estimate that the asteroid, between 300 to 1000 feet in diameter, has been hovering near Earth for the past 775 years, and it will only drift away in about 165 years from now.

Correction: Engineer and regular reader James Fincannon emailed me to note that this asteroid really doesn’t have an orbit “almost identical to the Earth.” As he wrote, “Seems to go between Venus and Mercury and then all the way out to Mars! It seems to pass by Earth occasionally.” Thus, this recent period of closeness is only a temporary one.

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