Author: Robert Zimmerman

Pushback: The legislative effort in Texas to end DEI in state colleges is beginning to work

1:19 pm

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the Texas state legislature passed a law last May (subsequently signed by Governor Greg Abbott) to ban all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in state colleges, I expressed some doubts about whether this legislature would work.

The universities have simply been told the money they formally spent on DEI can no longer be spent on such racist operations. Since they have the cash anyway, what will prevent college administrators to create a new office with a new name, let’s call it the “Openness and Support Office”, and hire the fired DEI staffers that have been terminated from a different college. By simply rearranging the chairs, these administrators — who apparently all enthusiastically support DEI’s Marxist and racist program — can recreate it without making it obvious. And the legislature has agreed to give them the funds for doing so.

It appears the house-cleaning is beginning in Texas universities
It appears the DEI house-cleaning is beginning
in Texas’ universities.

Since then, Texas university administrations have been responding to the legislation in a variety of ways, all of which suggest that, though my doubts continue to have merit, the bill is having a laudatory effect. This week the University of Texas at Austin announced that it is shuttering its DEI offices and terminating around sixty people associated with these bigoted programs. From the email announcement by the university president, Jay Hartzell:

[F]unding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.

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Gilmour’s Eris rocket now assembled and ready for launch from Bowen spaceport in Australia

10:43 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Click for original map.

The Austrialia rocket starup Gilmour has now assembled its first Eris rocket in anticipation of its first orbital test launch from that company’s Bowen spaceport on the east coast of Australia.

According to the report at the link, the launch could happen “in the coming weeks,” though no date has been set. Gilmour has already received its spaceport license from the Australian government, but has not yet gotten its launch license from the Australian Space Agency, despite putting in its application two years ago.

It appears there is now a race between this spaceport and the one on the south coast run by Southern Launch to launch first. Both are saying they will launch in mere weeks, but both are also awaiting launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency, which appears to be having difficulties making these first approvals. Either it is dragging its feet, or doesn’t know how to do this yet. Hopefully the bureaucrats will figure out how to say yes to freedom and let these spaceports and companies finally launch, before they run out of cash.

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NASA picks three commercial companies to build manned lunar rovers

10:29 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that it has picked three commercial companies, Astrolab, Intuitive Machines, and Lunar Outpost, to begin feasibility design work on its new manned lunar rovers, dubbed a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), for its planned Artemis missions to the Moon.

NASA will acquire the LTV as a service from industry. The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, milestone-based Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract with firm-fixed-price task orders has a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all awards.

The three companies are actually each a partnership of several American companies, as follows:

  • Astrolab is building its FLEX rover in partnership with Axiom Space, Inc., and Odyssey Space. Its contract is worth up to $1.9 billion.
  • Intuitive Machines is building its RACER rover in partership with AVL, Boeing, Michelin, and Northrop Grumman. This initial award is worth $30 million, but future buys from NASA could exceed $1 billion.
  • Lunar Outpost is building its Lunar Dawn rover in partnership with Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Goodyear, and MDA Space.

All three lead companies are essentially startups that have partnered with older established players, a likely requirement imposed by NASA to give their effort some experienced help. Though this system of dividing up the work between all the players follows the old scheme used by NASA and the established big space companies for decades in order to guarantee every company gets steady work and a continuing cash flow from the government, the difference is that the product will be designed, built, and owned by each partnership, not NASA, allowing each to sell that product to others outside the agency.

If this goes as planned, eventually the government money will become somewhat irrelevant, once a real commercial industry starts functioning in space and on the Moon. That’s what happened in the airplane industry in the 1920s to the 1950s.

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Engineers confirm IXPE is fixed and resuming science observations

10:00 am

Engineers have now confirmed the software fix they sent to the IXPE space telescope on March 26, 2024 has worked, and have taken the telescope out of safe mode so that it can resume science observations.

The IXPE mission is now observing a new transient X-ray source – Swift J1727.8–161 – a candidate accreting black hole. The source has recently begun producing jets of material moving at a fraction of the speed of light. The IXPE observations will help to understand accretion onto black holes, including potentially revealing how the relativistic jets are formed.

The telescope observes the universe in X-rays, but does so by observing its polarization. This approach provides information not seen in direct observations.

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April 3, 2024 Quick space links

3:34 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

 

 

 

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Complex ridged terrain in ancient Martian crater

2:06 pm

Complex ridges in an ancient Martian crater
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on January 16, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Because an electronic unit for one of this camera’s filters has failed, causing a blank strip in the image center, I have filled in that gap using an MRO context camera image taken October 31, 2015.

The scientists describe this geology as “ridged terrain.” What I see is a surface that was like wet plaster once, and then a giant finger touched it and pulled away quickly, so that as it left some material pulled upward to create random ridges within the depression created by that finger.

These ridges are inside a very very ancient 110-mile-wide crater dubbed Margulis. According to the 2021 poster [pdf] of the scientists who did the first geological mapping of this crater, the crater floor “show remnants of sedimentary materials, suggesting the [crater was] subjected to widespread episodes of resurfacing and denudation.”

Though located in the dry equatorial regions, this ridged terrain suggests it formed suddenly when underground ice sublimated into gas, bursting upward to break the surface when the gas pressure became high enough.
» Read more

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Biden’s anti-Christian Easter proclamation means the Democrats believe their November victory is certain

11:48 am

Biden's proclamation declaring Easter a day to honor the queer agenda
Biden’s proclamation declaring Easter a day
honoring the queer agenda. Click for full proclamation.

The decision by the White House to declare Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian religion, to instead be this year’s “Transgender Day of Visibility”, as shown by the screen capture of his declaration to the right, outraged and insulted millions of religious people throughout the country.

That outrage was further inflamed when the very next day Joe Biden boldly denied he had done any such thing, even though he had done it only one day previously.

“I didn’t do that,” Biden said when asked about proclaiming Easter Sunday ‘trans day of visibility.” Asked about Speaker Johnson’s claim otherwise, the president replied, “he’s thoroughly uninformed.”

Most political analysis of these events has focused on whether these actions suggest Biden is entirely incompetent, or whether it proves that others run things in the White House and that Biden is merely a puppet on a string. In either case, those analyses noted that these actions showed an amazing contempt for the religious community that could only hurt Biden in November.

I see this in an entirely different way. While the decision showed utter contempt of Christians, who consider the queer agenda to be deviant and sinful, it also showed us two things about the Democratic Party leadership, whether Biden or the puppet masters pulling his strings, that should truly terrify every single American who values our democratic republic, its Constitution, and its Bill of Rights.
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An abandoned module from one of China’s manned capsules burns up over California

9:29 am

The orbital module of China’s Shenzhou-15 manned capsule, launched with three astronauts in November 2022 and then abandoned in orbit when those astronauts returned to Earth in the spring of 2023, burned up over southern California yesterday.

The fall created a blazing fireball witnessed by people from the Sacramento area all the way down to San Diego, according to the American Meteor Society (AMS). As of Tuesday afternoon, 81 people had reported sightings of the event to the AMS.

It is unlikely, though not impossible, that any pieces hit the ground. The module is considered small enough to be destroyed during descent. Nonetheless, its uncontrolled re-entry highlights China’s general irresponsibility when it comes to space junk. For example, the Russia Soyuz capsule has a similar design, but based on history Russia has for decades routinely controlled the de-orbit of its abandoned orbital module so that it does not come down over land.

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Technical issues with Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule to delay next Artemis mission

9:20 am

It appears that technical issues with Lockheed Martin’s Orion capsule are one of the main reasons NASA has had to delay next Artemis mission, the first to put humans inside that capsule and then take them around the Moon.

In January 2024 it was reported that the mission would be delayed from a launch before the end of 2024 until 2025. We now know why:

NASA is working with Orion spacecraft prime contractor Lockheed Martin to resolve a handful of issues that came up late last year during ground testing, forcing the space agency to delay the launch readiness target date for its Artemis II circumlunar mission to September 2025. The Lockheed Martin assembly, test, and launch operations (ATLO) team at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) is reinstalling some electronics and implementing workarounds for others affected by an electrical circuit flaw found in digital motor controllers on the spacecraft.

While a resolution to that issue appears to be getting closer, the Orion program and contractor teams are also working through the corrective actions process for a problem with how the Orion batteries handle the shock of an extreme abort case.

In other words, Lockheed Martin discovered these two electrical issues only last year, after spending almost two decades and more than $15 billion developing Orion.

As I predicted in January, “None of these dates will be met. I predict that further delays will be announced next year and the year after that, pushing all these missions back again, in small increments.” I also predicted that NASA will be lucky to land a human on the Moon by 2030, a mere fifteen years after its original target date of 2015, set by George Bush Jr. in 2004.

In the meantime, expect SpaceX’s Starship to begin regularly commercial and governmental flights to the Moon in the next five years. Long before SLS and Orion put humans on the Moon, Starship will be doing it privately for less cost.

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White House tasks NASA to create a clock standard for time on the Moon

9:07 am

In a policy announcement yesterday, the White House has directed NASA to establish a coordinated lunar time standard (dubbed LTC) for time on the Moon, similar to Univeral or Greenwich time (UTC) now used on Earth.

A unified time standard—Coordinated Lunar Time (LTC)—will act as the established standard to enable cislunar operations and can be tied to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the primary time standard globally used to regulate clocks and time on Earth. This policy directs NASA to work with the Departments of Commerce, Defense, State, and Transportation to deliver a strategy for the implementation of LTC no later than December 31, 2026. NASA will also coordinate with other federal agencies as appropriate and international partners through existing international forums, including Artemis Accords partner nations.

As noted in the full policy statement [pdf]:

Due to general and special relativity, the length of a second defined on Earth will appear distorted to an observer under different gravitational conditions, or to an observer moving at a high relative velocity. For example, to an observer on the Moon, an Earth-based clock will appear to lose on
average 58.7 microseconds per Earth-day with additional periodic variations.

While this difference would be utterly unnoticed by people, the difference will become a problem for GPS systems and other very sensitive systems that depend on precise timing. The new policy will attempt to prevent such issues by getting ahead of the problem. It will also work to coordinate this new lunar universal time with other nations doing lunar exploration.

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Roscosmos approves design of Russia’s proposed new space station

8:56 am

According to TASS, Russia’s state-run press, its space agency Roscosmos has now approved the design of its proposed new Russian Orbital Station (ROS), with a targeted launch date sometime between 2027 and 2032.

The station’s core module will have six docking ports for accommodating add-on modules. Each of the station’s modules will be replaceable, if necessary, so the ROS’s service life is likely to last decades.

The station will stay in a polar orbit with an inclination of up to 97 degrees.

That last feature will make this station unique, as all other previous and planned manned space stations use orbits relatively close to the equator so they never fly over the poles. ROS’s orbit will allow it to see almost the entire Earth surface, including all of Russia.

Despite the fact that this design is essentially the same as the Mir station the Soviet Union launched in 1986 and operated until the late 1990s, do not expect this new station to launch on schedule. Based on Russia’s track record since the fall of the Soviet Union, expect many delays that will stretch development into decades. If its first module launches before 2032 I will be amazed.

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First manned Starliner mission now targeting a May 6, 2024 launch

8:47 am

In order to work around scheduling issues at ISS, NASA and Boeing have now scheduled the first manned Starliner mission to launch no earlier than May 6, 2024.

Following a review of the International Space Station operations, NASA’s Boeing Crew Flight Test now is targeting no earlier than Monday, May 6, for Starliner’s first launch with astronauts to the orbital complex. The date adjustment optimizes space station schedule of activities planned toward the end of April, including a cargo spacecraft undocking and a crew spacecraft port relocation required for Starliner docking. NASA and Boeing also are performing prelaunch closeout work and completing final certification for flight.

Two astronauts will fly the capsule to ISS for a two week stay, testing its systems in order to determine if it is ready for regular operations.

This launch is years behind schedule due to numerous technical problems that have cost Boeing billions in extra costs as well as lost income. In order to convince other customers besides NASA to buy seats on Starliner will likely require the capsule to fly many times without issues. Until then, I suspect anyone wishing to do a tourist flight in space will pick SpaceX instead, because of its now proven safety and reliability record.

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China launches a “remote sensing” satellite

8:27 am

China yesterday successfully launched what it described simply as a “remote sensing” satellite, its Long March 2D rocket lifting off from it Xichang launch site in the southwest of China.

No word whether the rocket’s lower stage, using toxic hypergolic fuel, crashed near any habitable areas inside China.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

33 SpaceX
14 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined in successful launches 38 to 25, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 33 to 30.

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April 2, 2024 Quick space links

4:35 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

  • Head of France’s space agency visits Axiom

    • In recent weeks France has suddenly discovered the wonders of capitalism. This visit likely involves its recognition that ISS is soon going away, and that it will have to then deal with private commercial station operators.

 

 

 

 

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Patches of volcanic Martian ash covering patches of frozen volcanic dunes

11:30 am

Patches of volcanic Martian ash over frozen volcanic dunes

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 24, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

What makes this terrain intriguing are the series of parallel ridges that cover most of the picture, with smaller ridges at right angles filling the hollows between. It appears we are looking at two different sets of dunes, the larger ridges indicating the southeast-to-northwest direction of the prevailing winds, while the smaller ridges in the hollows suggest the wind patterns within the hollows, causing smaller ripple dunes to form at right angles.

Note however the flat patches in the lower left. The material there appears to fill the hollows, covering the dunes. We can tell this by the hollows to the east, which have an almost identical dune pattern. Those flat patches then are likely covering similar dunes, with the patched material either having been blown away to expose the lower dunes, or having been blown here to cover them in patches. That the dunes appear unchanged under this patched material when exposed also suggests strongly that these dunes are hardened into stone, no longer soft sand that can be blown by the wind.
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Sunspot update: The weak solar maximum continues

10:38 am

NOAA yesterday posted its updated monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. As I do every month, I have posted this graph below, with several additional details to provide some larger context.

The sunspot activity in March dropped, continuing the pattern of the last five months, where the Sun appears to be in a stable plateau after reaching a high peak in the summer of 2023. It continues to appear that we are in the middle low saddle of a double-peaked relatively weak solar maximum, with the Sun doing what I predicted in February:

If we are now in maximum, sunspot activity throughout the rest of 2024 should fluctuate at the level it is right now, with it suddenly rising again near the end of the year for a period lasting through the first half of 2025. After that it should begin its ramp down to solar minimum.

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Video shows Astra rocket exploding on launchpad during early 2020 launch attempt

9:12 am

In March 2020 the rocket startup Astra was attempting to complete its first orbital test launch. After one attempt that was scrubbed, the next ended with what the company called “an anomaly” when a fire destroyed the rocket on the launchpad.

Immediately after that failure the company furloughed one fifth of its workforce, and did not succeed in getting a rocket to orbit until November 2021, after another two failures.

Video obtained by Tech Chrunch now shows what happened on that March 2020 failure. The Astra rocket simply exploded on launchpad, destroying everything.

The company has been an example of the risks of freedom and private enterprise. It appeared to be one of the big successes, getting rockets built and launched, during which it also went public. Instead, after a few launch successes it abandoned its rocket, ran out of cash, and then the stock was purchased for pennies by the company’s two founders — taking it private once again. At the moment it is not clear if the company will ever rise from the ashes.

In other words, buyer beware. The claims of any new company is not to be trusted blindly. Sometimes their claims are filled with hubris.

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De-orbiting debris from ISS hits a house in Florida

8:58 am

It appears that a 2-pound piece of a de-orbiting “cargo pallet” from ISS bored through the roof of a house in Florida on March 8, 2024 and broke through two floors.

A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash at 2:34 pm local time (19:34 UTC) on March 8. That’s an important piece of information because it is a close match for the time—2:29 pm EST (19:29 UTC)—that US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris from the space station. At that time, the object was on a path over the Gulf of Mexico, heading toward southwest Florida.

This space junk consisted of depleted batteries from the ISS, attached to a cargo pallet that was originally supposed to come back to Earth in a controlled manner. But a series of delays meant this cargo pallet missed its ride back to Earth, so NASA jettisoned the batteries from the space station in 2021 to head for an unguided reentry.

NASA had taken possession of the piece to determine for certain if it is from ISS. Who is liable for the damages could become a legal tangle. The depleted batteries were owned by NASA, but were brought to ISS on a Japanese HTV cargo freighter. According to the Outer Space Treaty, the nation that launches an item is liable for any damages it causes when it crashes back on Earth. The language however doesn’t really cover a case where one nation builds the item for launch, and another nation launches it.

The owner, Alejandro Otero, had to use Twitter to get a response from NASA. According to his tweet, he had called and emailed the agency and had been ignored. Only after other news sources picked up the story did NASA respond. Furthermore, when NASA jettisoned the pallet from ISS it had insisted that the discarded batteries would burn up entirely in the atmosphere, even though other experts said differently.

The Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded research and development center, says a “general rule of thumb” is that 20 to 40 percent of the mass of a large object will reach the ground. The exact percentage depends on the design of the object, but these nickel-hydrogen batteries were made of metals with relatively high density. Ahead of the reentry, the European Space Agency also acknowledged some fragments from the battery pallet may survive to the ground.

What this information tells us is that NASA knew this discarded pallet posed a risk, but made believe it didn’t.

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SpaceX launches 22 Starlink satellites

8:27 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully placed another 22 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.

The first stage completed its fifteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

33 SpaceX
13 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined in successful launches 38 to 24, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 33 to 29.

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April 1, 2024 Quick space links

4:45 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

 

 

  • US court asks India to pay $132 million to Deutsche Telekom in Devas Antrix case

    • Don’t ask me to explain this. The Devas Antrix legal case has been wandering through various international courts since 2005, and I have never been able to find a clear explanation for the court battles. What I do know is that it involves Antrix, what was then the commercial arm of India’s ISRO space agency, and a number of international companies, all of which have sued when the project was canceled.

 

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Boeing’s problems are only the tip of the iceberg

1:25 pm

Most of all beware this boy.’
As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present in Dickens’ The Christmas
Carol, ‘This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both,
but most of all beware this boy.’

Since the beginning of this year, following the near disaster when a door of a Boeing 737-Max airline blew off during the Alaska Airlines flight, the media has been obsessed with reporting every single subsequent Boeing airplane incident as attributed to bad management and quality control at Boeing.

The problem with this shallow reporting is that it fails entirely in recognizing the real depth of the problem.

First, in most of the incidents reported, the planes involved were not recent purchases from Boeing, but had been owned by the airlines for years, sometimes decades. Thus, any maintenance issues, such as a wheel falling off after take-off or a landing gear collapsing on landing or the sudden failure of an Airbus plane’s hydraulic system, are not Boeing’s fault, but the fault of the airline the plane belongs to. In the case of these particular incidents, that airline was United, and in every case, the failure was with its maintenance department, not Boeing’s bad management and poor quality control.

A similar string of incidents has also occurred at American Airlines, involving both Boeing and Airbus airplanes. With both United and American, evidence suggests that the quality of its maintenance staff has likely declined significantly since 2020, when both companies decided to abopt Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) hiring practices, which made skin color and sex the most important qualification in hiring, rather than talent, skill, experience, or knowledge.

It is important for readers to recognize this fact when they see new stories about a Boeing plane forced to make an emergency landing, such as the story today about a United Airlines’ Boeing 787. It apparently had a cracked windshield, requiring an unscheduled landing in Chicago. The article at the link focuses a great deal on Boeing, but the focus should instead be on United Airlines, not the airplane maker, since it is United’s responsibility to keep its fleet flightworthy. When an airline fails to do so, future customers should take note, and consider other options when they need to fly.

In other words, you shouldn’t avoid flying on a Boeing plane, you should avoid flying on airlines that maintain their airplanes badly.

Having said this, I don’t want my readers to think I am trying to let Boeing off the hook. Far from it. » Read more

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Interacting galaxies

9:27 am

Interacting galaxies
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a dark energy survey. It shows two galaxies very close together, their perpheries only about 40,000 light years apart, with the larger galaxy about the size of the Milky Way.

For comparison, the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is about 167,000 light years from the Milky Way, more than four times farther that this satellite galaxy. Yet the satellite galaxy here appears much larger than the LMC, having a central core that the LMC lacks. From the caption:

Given this, coupled with the fact that NGC 5996 is roughly comparable in size to the Milky Way, it is not surprising that NGC 5996 and NGC 5994 — apparently separated by only 40 thousand light-years or so — are interacting with one another. In fact, the interaction might be what has caused the spiral shape of NGC 5996 to distort and apparently be drawn in the direction of NGC 5994. It also prompted the formation of the very long and faint tail of stars and gas curving away from NGC 5996, up to the top right of the image. This ‘tidal tail’ is a common phenomenon that appears when galaxies get in close together, as can be seen in several Hubble images.

In this single picture we are witnessing evidence of a process that has been going on for likely many millions of years.

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Australian spaceport on sourthern coast prepares for launch

11:06 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Click for original map.

According to a report today, the first suborbital launch from a new commercial spaceport on the sourthern coast of Australia is now expected by the end of April or early May.

New launch facilities at the Koonibba Test Range, South Australia’s first permanent spaceport, are almost complete ahead of the impending inaugural launch. Located northwest of Ceduna, the range is a partnership between Southern Launch and the Koonibba Community Aboriginal Corporation. It is the largest commercial testing range in the Southern Hemisphere.

Space Industries Minister Susan Close is today visiting the site ahead of the sub-orbital test launch of German manufacturer HyImpulse’s SR75 rocket, which, subject to final regulatory approval, will go ahead at the end of April or early May. The rocket will reach an altitude of 50 kilometres before parachuting back to Earth where it will be recovered for testing.

Southern Launch, marked on the map to the right, is on south coast of Australia. Two other Australian commercial spaceports also under development are noted on the northern and eastern coasts.

We shall see if this suborbital launch occurs as planned. Recently the evidence has suggested that Australia’s regulatory state is as bad as the United Kingdom, taking forever to issue licenses for private launches.

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Russia launches Earth observation satellite

10:12 am

Russia early this morning successfully launched a new Earth observation satellite, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Baikonus spaceport in Kazakhstan.

The side boosters, core stage, second stage, and fairings all crashed in two planned drop zones within Russia. No word if any landed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

32 SpaceX
13 China
5 Russia
4 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined in successful launches 37 to 24, and SpaceX by itself remains ahead everyone one else combined 32 to 29.

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SpaceX completes two launches in three and a half hours; third launch scrubbed

10:50 pm

And the beat goes on: Today SpaceX set a new marker for future launch companies, successfully launching twice from two different launchpads in Florida only three and a half hours apart, and then scrubbing a third launch due to weather on the opposite coast of the U.S. only a few hours after that.

First SpaceX launched a Eutelsat geosynchronous communications satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral at 5:52 pm (Eastern). Its first stage completed its twelth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

A little more than three and a half hours later, at 9:30 pm (Eastern), SpaceX launched 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from its second launchpad at Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

Finally, the third launch planned for the day, of another 22 Starlink satelites, was scrubbed at Vandenberg in California at about 10:30 pm (Pacific), or 1:30 am (Eastern) due to weather, despite multiple launch attempts during its two hour launch window. The flight will likely be rescheduled for sometime in the next few days.

No private company has ever attempted such a thing before, and only the Soviet Union might have done it during the height of its launch industry from 1970 to 1988, when it routinely launched between 80 and 100 times per year. Whether it ever did three launches in under nine hours however is not likely.

Even though only two of the three launches took off, what SpaceX tried to do today provides a further illustration of the company’s effort to make rocket launches as routine as airplane travel. It now launches at a pace and reliability that is unprecedented since the dawn of the space age, and was for decades considered by experts impossible. So much for experts. It always pays to ignore them when they tell you something is impossible.

The leaders in the 2024 space race:

32 SpaceX
13 China
4 Rocket Lab
4 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined in successful launches 37 to 23, and SpaceX by itself leads everyone one else combined 32 to 28.

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Varda releases results of its in-orbit test for producing pharmaceuticals in weightlessness

9:48 pm

On March 20, 2024 Varda released the results from its seven-month-long flight of its unmanned capsule, claiming that the technology worked to produce pharmaceuticals in weightlessness that will be better at treating some difficult illnesses such as HIV.

From the abstract of the preprint paper [pdf]:

Despite notable progress in realizing the benefits of microgravity, the physical stability of therapeutics processed in space has not been sufficiently investigated. Environmental factors including vibration, acceleration, radiation, and temperature, if not addressed could impact the feasibility of in-space drug processing. The presented work demonstrates the successful recovery of the metastable Form III of ritonavir generated in orbit. The test samples and passive controls containing each of the anhydrous forms of ritonavir; Form I, Form II, Form III, and amorphous exhibit excellent stability. By providing a detailed experimental dataset centered on survivability, we pave the way for the future of in-space processing of medicines that enable the development of novel drug products on Earth and benefit long-duration human exploration initiatives.

More research is likely required, but I suspect Varda will be able to raise investment capital from this success, since there is a lot of money to be made from pharmaceuticals that can only be produced in weightlessness.

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