Author: Robert Zimmerman

Surprise! NASA’s ’23 budget request asks for more money!

11:13 am

In releasing its budget request this week to Congress for the 2023 fiscal year, NASA did what it routinely does each year, ask for more money, this time asking for an 8% increase from what Congress appropriated last year.

NASA’s FY2023 budget request is $25.974 billion versus the FY2022 appropriation of $24.041 billion. NASA had requested $24.802 billion in large part to pay for the Artemis program to return astronauts to the lunar surface, but Congress wasn’t willing to allocate that much. While supportive of Artemis and NASA’s many other science, aeronautics and technology programs, there is a limit as to how much Congress is willing to invest.

NASA is requesting not just another boost in FY2023, but in the “out years” thereafter, rising to $28 billion in FY2027, though much of that purchasing power likely will be lost to inflation.

…In essence, the agency wants more money for everything it is doing.

The budget request also asks again for Congress to terminate the SOFIA airborne telescope, which NASA contends is not producing enough science to justify its $80 million annual cost. Congress has repeatedly refused to do so in past years. As should be expected, Congress will likely not cancel SOFIA again, as it likes to spend money we don’t have.

The goal of the increased funding for Artemis is also to continue the SLS program for many years to come. Expect Congress to also fund this in the coming few years, though the long term future of SLS remains in doubt, especially if SpaceX’s Starship begins flying. Artemis won’t be cancelled by our spendthrift Congress, but Congress will likely decide to shift that spending to Starship and other private rockets rather than SLS as those private rockets come on line.

All in all, expect Congress to give NASA more cash, but not as much as the agency requests.

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Five European and Canadian teams win ESA contest to develop lunar rovers

10:42 am

Capitalism in space: Five European and Canadian teams have been awarded 75K euro contracts to develop their own lunar rovers, with these winners determined during a European Space Agency (ESA) contest that tested a prototype design in a simulated lunar polar environment.

“The competing rovers had to navigate and map the whole test environment to prospect for useable resources – meaning first of all to track down their location, identify the best and safest passages to access them, then to gather information about the characteristics and the composition of the rocks they find,” explains Massimo Sabbatini, overseeing the contest’s first phase for ESA.

“The various teams took various approaches in terms of locomotion – we had wheeled, tracked and also walking vehicles – as well as visual and multi-spectral instrumentation, and in a few cases multiple instead of single rovers. The five out of 12 teams who move forward to the next stage receive a development grant to increase their technology readiness ahead of the second stage challenge, hosted by ESRIC in Luxembourg this autumn.”

This contest mimics the American effort to transition from government-built space probes to privately-built. The goal is to encourage private development of lunar rovers, capable of providing this service to future ESA projects at a lower cost and much more quickly. The contest is also designed to encourage such private companies outside the U.S., so as to compete with the emerging American industry of lunar rover companies.

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Scientists: Ice layers in Burroughs Crater confirm Martian orbital climate cycles

10:29 am

Layering in the west side of Burroughs Crater
Click for full image.

According to a new paper published today, scientists have used the ice layers inside Burroughs Crater on Mars to confirm the theory that the Red Planet has undergone numerous climate cycles during the past four million years, caused by the swings in the planet’s rotational tilt and eccentric orbit. From the press release:

Previously, Martian climate scientists have focused on polar ice caps, which span hundreds of kilometers. But these deposits are old and may have lost ice over time, losing fine details that are necessary to confidently establish connections between the planet’s orientation and motion and its climate.

Sori and his colleagues turned to ice mounds in craters, just tens of kilometers wide but much fresher and potentially less complicated. After scouring much of the southern hemisphere, they pinpointed Burroughs crater, 74 kilometers wide, that has “exceptionally well-preserved” layers visible from NASA HiRISE [Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s high resolution camera] imagery, Sori said.

The researchers analyzed the layers’ thicknesses and shapes and found they had strikingly similar patterns to two important Martian orbital dynamics, the tilt of Mars’ axis and orbital precession, over the last 4 to 5 million years.

The photo above of those layers was taken by Europe’s Trace Gas Orbiter on March 13, 2019, cropped and reduced to post here.

This research greatly strengthens the theory that the ice on Mars gets distributed to different latitudes in cycles, depending on the cyclical fluctuations in the planet’s orbit and tilt. However, it does not yet confirm these cycles apply to the glaciers found in craters in lower latitudes. Burroughs Crater is at 72 degrees south latitude, near the southern polar ice cap, well south of the band of glaciers scientists have discovered in the mid-latitudes down to 30 degrees latitude. Nonetheless, this research strongly suggest the same cycles apply in those lower latitudes.

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Japanese satellite startup Synspective raises $100 million

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: The Japanese satellite startup Synspective announced today that it has successfully raised $100 million in private investment capital.

The latest funding was led by Sompo Japan Insurance Inc. (Tokyo, Japan), Nomura SPARX Investment, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan), and Pavilion Capital Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) among others, as well as bank loans, and it is supposed to be ranked within the top ten largest startups in Japan. This puts our total funding value at US $200M (22.8 billion yen) since our founding.

The company plans to launch a constellation of 30 radar satellites by 2026, designed to do Earth resource observations.

Synspective had hoped to launch its first demonstration satellite in ’23 on a Soyuz rocket. That launch is presently threatened by Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine, though it is not clear if it has been cancelled.

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China successfully launches Long March 6A for the first time

9:55 am

China today successfully completed the first launched of its Long March 6A rocket, upgraded significantly from earlier versions of the Long March 6.

The launch also debuted a new launchpad at China’s Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in the country’s interior. The two payloads deployed appear to be technology tests, though China provided little information.

The launch of the Long March 6A also sported four solid rocket strap-on boosters. With these and the core first stage all crashing on land in China, there was no word whether any had any technology for controlling their landings.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

11 SpaceX
7 China
4 Russia
2 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 17 to 7 in the national rankings.

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Singapore signs Artemis Accords

9:46 am

Singapore announced yesterday that it has become the eighteenth nation to sign the Artemis Accords with the United States.

The full list of signatories: Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.

Though the press announcement claims the accords are “grounded in the Outer Space Treaty,” this is only superficially correct. The real goal of the accords is to build a coalition of governments that wish to overcome the treaty’s restrictions on property rights in space.

Russia and China oppose the accords. Of the other big space-faring nations, France, Germany, and India remain uncommitted one way or the other. The Ukraine War could very well push all three to sign the accords, as their partnerships with Russia have largely vanished, and with them any incentive to stay out. Moreover, the U.S. has made it clear that for a nation to participate in its Artemis program it must sign the accords.

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Ice sheets on Mars below 30 degrees latitude?

12:56 pm

Cracks in Ice on Mars?
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on November 29, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a collection of scattered thin surface fractures, grouped in clusters of parallel lines with the orientation of the clusters all somewhat random to other clusters.

The fractures, as well as the material inside the craters, appears to resemble glacial features, suggesting that these fractures are the result of either the past motion of the glacial sheet, or the sublimation of the buried ice, which causes it to crack and shrink as it slowly dissipates away.

The problem with that hypothesis is the location, as shown by the overview map below.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: TV reporter fired for covering protest objectively

12:16 pm

Johathan Choe, blacklisted for being a good reporter
Johathan Choe, blacklisted for being a good reporter

The new dark age of silencing: A television reporter for the ABC affiliate in Seattle, KOMO, Jonathan Choe, was fired after he had covered, as accurately as possible, a peaceful Proud Boys demonstration in Seattle, including a photo montage of the event.

Choe, a reporter of 20 years, created a photo montage with sound from the march to end his day. In the clips, he included music from the rally that included a song called “We’ll Have Our Home Again.” Although Choe was unfamiliar with the tune, it is allegedly played frequently at Proud Boys rallies and similar gatherings.

“I wanted to simply capture a moment in time, with authentic visuals and sounds. It was clearly misinterpreted by some on-line,” Choe wrote.

Because of the uproar, Choe said his news director told him to take down all his social media related to the Proud Boys rally. He did so, but was fired the following day, he said.

By his own response to his firing Choe reveals that he himself buys into the racist, anti-American propaganda of today’s left, focusing much of his commentary on his race (he is Asian-American) and noting that though he has been a successfully journalist “for more than 20 years,” he has somehow “faced years of discrimination for my race and ethnicity.” The willful blindness of these statements is astonishing. How could Choe get a great job for a major television affiliate reporting the news if he was living in such a terrible bigoted nation (which by the way has recently twice elected a black man as president)?

No matter. He tried to do his job well and fairly, and a Twitter mob immediately descended upon him. His boss then cowered in fear, forcing Choe to first censor his work, and then firing him because the only thing that will satisfy a lynch mob is a lynching.

Of course, the lynching is not enough. » Read more

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The seeds of today’s madness were planted decades ago

9:58 am

Political journalist Doug Ross yesterday re-posted an essay he had written a decade ago, which had successfully predicted the crime wave we are undergoing today.

In it, he outlined how the growth in 2011 in government anti-poverty and welfare programs — which acted to further tear apart families — was going to lead to what he called “a true Obama Crime Wave” sometime in the early 2020s.

  • Fact: There are a record number of Americans dependent upon government anti-poverty programs thanks to the Obama Democrats
  • Fact: Expanded access to welfare and food stamps greatly increases the number of children born to unwed mothers
  • Fact: Single-parent families correlate to higher crime rates
  • Conclusion: with the unprecedented increase in welfare, food stamps and unemployment, we will also see an unparalleled increase in violent crime within the next dozen or so years.

Obama and his Democrat sycophants in Congress will have created hundreds of thousands of single-parent families. These kids, born out-of-wedlock, will find themselves trapped in lives of criminality at far higher rates than kids from two-parent families.

Fast forward a dozen years, give or take a couple, and we will see a true Obama Crime Wave. I predict that we will see an unprecedented increase in crime. In fact, you could call it historic.

And the question is not whether it will happen. The question is just how bad it will be.

Ross’s prediction in 2011 was of course guaranteed to be right, as good social science research since the early and mid-twentieth century had shown that if you raise children in broken homes, chaos ensues when they reach adulthood.

I think however that Ross and most previous researchers have missed half the equation. Broken homes certainly produce adults who don’t know right from wrong, and thus become hardened and violent criminals.
» Read more

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SpaceX to freeze its manned Dragon capsule fleet at four

9:12 am

Capitalism in space: According to SpaceX officials, the company is suspending construction on any further manned Dragon capsules, freezing its fleet at the four capsules they have now built, Endeavour, Resilience, Endurance, and Freedom.

“We are finishing our final (capsule), but we still are manufacturing components, because we’ll be refurbishing,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told Reuters, confirming the plan to end Crew Dragon manufacturing.

She added that SpaceX would retain the capability to build more capsules if a need arises in the future, but contended that “fleet management is key.”

This decision — to only use reused capsules — will of course give SpaceX to ability to lower its prices for manned tourist flights, but I doubt that will happen at this time because there isn’t anyone presently available who can compete. Instead, the company will rake in more profits.

The decision however does indicate SpaceX’s own assessment of the present space tourism market. If the company thought it needed more capsules in its fleet to match the demand, it would of course build them. Right now, it appears the company has decided four capsules is enough to cover NASA’s needs, as well as any additional private commercial flights. It also suggests SpaceX is anticipating the eventual arrival of Boeing’s Starliner into the mix, which will pick up some of the business that so far has belonged entirely to SpaceX.

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Curiosity presently traveling over broken sandstone from an ancient dune field

10:27 am

Gator-back terrain on Mars
Click for full image.

According to a new paper, scientists now think that the rough and broken cap layer of the Greenheugh pediment that Curiosity is presently traveling across was originally a dune field periodically washed by water runoff, which with time eventually hardened into sandstone.

That broken terrain, dubbed “gator-back terrain” by the Curiosity science team, is shown clearly in the image to the right, taken on March 20, 2022. From the paper’s abstract:

The Greenheugh pediment is capped by a unit of broadly uniform thickness which represents the remains of the Stimson dune field that existed <2.5 Ga (mid- to late-Hesperian). ChemCam geochemical data shows that the sands deposited at the Greenheugh capping unit were sourced from a nearby olivine-rich unit. Surface waters then cemented the windblown sand deposits, ponding at the unconformity with the underlying mudstone unit, creating concretions towards the base. Episodes of groundwater circulation did not affect the rocks at Greenheugh as much as they did at other Stimson localities with the exception of acid-sulfate alteration that occurred along the unconformity. These results suggest that the ancient Stimson dune field was a dynamic environment, incorporating grains from the surrounding geological units on Mt Sharp. Furthermore, liquid water was stable at the surface in the Hesperian and was available for multiple diagenetic events along bedrock weaknesses.

In other words, material from Mount Sharp formed the dune fields, all of which were reshaped by groundwater circulation, with the dunes higher on the mountain seeing less groundwater.

The biggest uncertainty of these findings is explaining how surface liquid water could exist on Mars. Scientists have yet to develop an accepted model that would allow it. Another possibility would be the recent data that suggests Gale Crater was filled with glaciers. If so, scientists would need to figure out how the interaction of a Martian glacier might have geologically changed those dunes in a manner similar to groundwater.

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