Author: Robert Zimmerman

India successfully tests solid rocket booster for its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle

10:11 am

The new colonial movement: India yesterday successfully completed a ground test of the solid rocket booster to be used in its Small Satellite Launch Vehicle (SSLV).

SSLV was originally scheduled for launch in 2020 but was put on hold for two years when India panicked over the Wuhan flu. ISRO, India’s space agency, hopes now to complete the first launch in the next two months.

The two-year delay cost ISRO significantly in the international smallsat market. While American private companies like SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit, and Astra continued to launch throughout the epidemic and thus garner business from the smallsat market, India’s market share shrunk. Whether it can recover that share once SSLV begins flying remains to be seen. India’s willingness to shut down so easily will I think make satellite companies hesitate before buying its services.

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Mark Vande Hei sets new record for longest American space flight

10:03 am

Mark Vande Hei today set a new record for the longest American space flight, exceeding the 340 days flown by Scott Kelly on ISS in 2012-2013.

Since Vande Hei is scheduled to return to Earth on March 30th, his total record flight time should end up being 355 days, just short of a full year.

Vande Hei arrived at the space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on April 9, 2021, knowing at the time that he would be there for at least for the five to six months that is typical today for expedition crew members. His mission was extended by NASA in September to allow for a Russian movie crew to visit the orbiting complex and, more importantly, protect against a crew rotation schedule that could leave the station without any Americans on board.

Vande Hei’s record will be the fifth longest, behind four other Russians on Mir. Musa Manarov and Vladimir Titov were the first to complete a year long flight in 1987-1988. Valery Polyakov holds the record for the longest flight, 437 days in 1994-1995. Sergei Avdeyev’s flight of 381 days on Mir in 1998-1999 is the second longest.

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Astra successfully completes its second orbital launch

9:44 am

Capitalism in space: After a February 10, 2022 launch failure, the rocket startup Astra today successfully completed its second orbital launch and first in 2022, putting its first commercial payloads into orbit.

Unfortunately the separation and deployment of a payload platform from the upper stage had not been confirmed as of this posting. While the payloads can still function attached to the upper stage (they are not fully functional satellites), if this deployment turns out to be a failure it will put a stain on the launch. Astra confirmed the successful deployment of the payloads about an hour after launch.

That the company could investigate a launch failure, fix the problem, and resume launches in just over a month however speaks well for its future. If the deployment failed fixing it should proceed as quickly. Meanwhile, the company announced yesterday a new multi-launch contract through 2025 with Spaceflight, which finds launches for smallsats and also provides a small tug to move them into their preferred orbit.launches.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race remain unchanged:

10 SpaceX
5 China
2 ULA
2 Russia

The U.S. now leads China 16 to 5 in the national rankings.

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Entire Russian communications satellite industry threatened by Russia’s Ukraine invasion

9:12 am

Because almost all Russian communications satellites rely on western components, the sanctions imposed on Russia due to its invasion of the Ukraine will likely prevent the future launch of any such satellites.

The overwhelmingly wide sanctions against the Kremlin left practically no chance for Russia to complete any of its communications satellites in the development pipeline at the time due to their dependency on Western payloads.

Conceivably, Russia could turn to China for necessary components or/and Moscow could try again developing necessary competencies inside the country, but given little signs of progress on both of those fronts in the past, it could probably take years if not decades before all the technological gaps could be closed and it would be even more difficult to do under much harsher economic conditions and export controls. It is also a question whether China would be interested in boosting strategically important industries in Russia with potential military implications or whether it would want to challenge the Western sanctions regime by putting at risk its far more important trade relations with the United States.

The article at the link also notes the generally low quality of Russian communications satellites, which for example generally last only five to six years, compared to the 10 to 15 year lifespan of western satellites. This low quality has meant that Russia has been unable to sell this technology to anyone outside Russia.

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Dumping Windows and Apple and switching to Linux

8:32 pm

My regular readers know about my utter contempt for Microsoft and its terrible Windows operating system. Any company that treats its customers like dirt, as Microsoft routinely does, does not deserve the business of anyone. I realized this reality two decades ago, and successfully switched to Linux back in 2006. I have never regretted it.

Moreover, the increasingly intolerant behavior of big tech companies like Microsoft to free speech increases the need for people to free themselves from them. The willingness of these companies to also treat your privacy and personal data as a plaything for their use, without your permission, is another rational reason to stop depending on them.

Linux accomplishes this, in that its open source software structure is really controlled by no one. There is also no software company using the operating system to gather your data for its own purposes.

In 2016, after seeing a number of my posts noting the advantages of Linux (or anything) over Windows, one of my readers, James Stephens, offered to write a series for Behind the Black describing step-by-step the process by which one gets and installs Linux on either a desktop or laptop computer. Below are the links to this series. I have since used it myself as a guide to convert two used Windows 7 notebooks (purchased for $35 and $80) to my favorite flavor of Linux, both of which I use regularly as my travel computers.

I wish more people would do the same, which is why I am reposting the links to this series again. Though six years have passed, James instructions still apply perfectly, as I can attest as I used this series to convert the second laptop only a year ago. Nonetheless, James has added an addendum to Part 2, which brings the entire series up to date.

I am sure almost everyone has an old computer they don’t use anymore. It will work like new with Linux. Dig it out, follow James’ instructions below and free yourself from Windows. I guarantee you will not be disappointed.

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Mesa in the Martian northern lowlands

3:21 pm

Mesa in the dry northern lowlands
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on February 2, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows a mesa sticking up on the relatively flat and featureless northern lowland plains in Utopia Planitia, the second largest impact basin on Mars.

The full image shows three such mesas. Though pictures taken in the northern lowlands of Utopia tend to show evidence of buried ice or glaciers, the impression I get from this picture is one of dryness. If there is any ice here, it is below ground. And even that seems unlikely. The surface surrounding nearby craters does not have that squishy and slushy look that is seen in the north when an impact occurred on near surface ice. Instead, the ground looks solid.

The overview map below reinforces this impression.
» Read more

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Pushback: Teacher sues for being suspended for defying pronoun demands

12:27 pm

Owned by government
This is apparently what Kansas school administrators think

Don’t comply: Pamela Ricard, a teacher at Fort Riley Middle School in Kansas, has sued the local school board there for suspending her for three days for refusing to call a female student by the male pronouns demanded.

Ricard was suspended for three days and issued a formal reprimand in April 2021 for addressing a biologically female student by the suffix “Ms.” and the student’s legal last name, according to the Herzog Foundation. Ricard alleges that she received an email from the school’s counselor informing her that she must use the pronouns “he/him” to describe the biological female, though the student had never made a direct request.

At the time of Ricard’s three-day suspension, the complaint alleges that neither the district nor the middle school had a formal policy regarding student preferred name and pronoun usage and that Ricard was suspended under the “Bullying by Staff” policy. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words strongly suggest that this demand was not coming from the student, but from the counselor and school administration, and that there was a very good chance that this counselor and the administration were grooming the child sexually.

When the school then released a policy requiring teachers to to use the pronouns demanded, Ricard then requested a religious exemption, which apparently the school refused to give. From another report:
» Read more

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Russia today confirmed it will return NASA astronaut as planned

9:12 am

As expected, Russia today confirmed in its state-run TASS news agency that NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei will come back to Earth in its Soyuz capsule on March 30th, as planned.

The Soyuz MS-19 space capsule with Anton Shkaplerov, Pyotr Dubrov and Mark Vande Hei is expected to land on March 30. Dubrov and Vande Hei arrived on the ISS in the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft together with Oleg Novitsky. This descent module brought back to Earth the two feature film crew members – actress Yulia Peresild and film director Klim Shipenko, who had arrived on the ISS together with Anton Shkaplerov in the Soyuz MS-19 on October 5.

There had been a number of stories in the mainstream press suggesting the Russians would leave Vande Hei behind in response to the international sanctions being imposed on Russia because of its invasion of the Ukraine. All were based on a single comment by Roscosmos’ head Dmitry Rogozin, who had simply noted visuals from a Russian news source and aired in the U.S. that showed the Russian half of ISS separating away and leaving Vande Hei behind. Rogozin was only noting that the U.S. press was worried about this possibility.

There was no chance the Russians would separate its half of ISS now. Zero. To do such a thing will require several months of preparation. For example, the Russian half has at least one module, Zvezda, that is failing. If Russia ever creates its own new space station using part of ISS, it will have to launch some new modules first.

Also, for Russia to leave Vande Hei behind would be a public relations disaster that would only make worse the disaster of its invasion of the Ukraine. Russia might end its partnership at ISS in the near future, but it won’t do it in a way that might threaten the lives of any astronauts, from any nation.

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Supernova discovered in Cartwheel galaxy

8:54 am

Cartwheel Galaxy, before and after supernova
Click for full image.

Cool image time! In reviewing a December 2021 image of the Cartwheel Galaxy taken by the New Technology Telescope in Chile, astronomers noticed something that was not there in earlier images, a new supernovae.

The photo above, reduced to post here, compares a 2014 image, taken by the Very Large Telescope, with the 2021 photo. In the lower left of the new image is a bright object not in the previous photo.

This event, called SN2021afdx, is a type II supernova, which occurs when a massive star reaches the end of its evolution. Supernovae can cause a star to shine brighter than its entire host galaxy and can be visible to observers for months, or even years — a blink of an eye on astronomical timescales. Supernovae are one of the reasons astronomers say we are all made of stardust: they sprinkle the surrounding space with heavy elements forged by the progenitor star, which may end up being part of later generations of stars, the planets around them and life that may exist in those planets.

Cartwheel is about 500 million light years away, and because of its bright outer ring is one one of the more unusual nearby galaxies.

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