An evening pause: I like how they describe themselves on their YouTube page: “We sing in stairwells.”
Hat tip Cotour, who actually sent me a different performance by these guys. I had seen this performance elsewhere, and decided to use it instead.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on June 5, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a ridgeline at the base of the giant volcano Pavonis Mons, with slope streaks on ridge’s north and south sides.
Slope streaks are a mysterious phenomenon unique to Mars. While they resemble an avalanche, they do not change the topography of the surface at all. They appear to occur randomly year round, fading slowly with time. Also, while most are dark, scientists have also spotted bright slope streaks as well.
Slope streaks also only appear on surfaces covered with a layer of fine dust, something that is obviously the case in the cool image to the right. There is so much dust on the surface here that bedrock only appears at the top of the ridge, peeking out in only a few places.
The location of this image, as shown in the overview map below, adds some additional details.
» Read more
Banned by Brighton Central School District, NY.
The administrators at an upstate New York elementary school, Council Rock Primary, have decided to ban the song “Jingle Bells” because it might be “controversial or offensive.”
“Jingle Bells,” explained Council Rock principal Matt Tappon in an email, has been replaced with other songs that don’t have “the potential to be controversial or offensive.”
…Allison Rioux, Brighton Central School District assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, offered a different reason for removing “Jingle Bells.” She wrote, “Some suggest that the use of collars on slaves with bells to send an alert that they were running away is connected to the origin of the song Jingle Bells. While we are not taking a stance to whether that is true or not, we do feel strongly that this line of thinking is not in agreement with our district beliefs to value all cultures and experiences of our students.
“For this reason,” Rioux concluded, “along with the idea that there are hundreds of other 5 note songs, we made the decision to not teach the song directly to all students.” [emphasis mine]
Rioux use of the weasel words “Some suggest” as her source for this ridiculous justification is of course another way of her saying “I’m making this up.” According to Kyna Hamill of Boston University, the foremost expert on the history of the song (and whose work the school cites as their justification for the banning),
» Read more
The deployment of the complex sunshield for the James Webb Space Telescope has successfully begun, and if all continues as planned, will continue for the next five days.
Early this afternoon the Webb mission operations team concluded the deployment of the first of two structures that hold within them Webb’s most unpredictable and in many ways complicated component: the sunshield.
The structures – called the Forward and Aft Unitized Pallet Structures – contain the five carefully folded sunshield membranes, plus the cables, pulleys, and release mechanisms that make up Webb’s sunshield. The team completed the deployment of the forward pallet at approximately 1:21 p.m. EST, after beginning the entire process about four hours earlier. The team will now move on to the aft pallet deployment.
Over the next five days the aft pallet must be deployed, along with a tower assembly that will raise the telescope itself away from the sunshield to better keep Webb cold. After this the deployment of the many additional parts of the shield will take place, a process that is probably the most complex in-space spacecraft deployment ever.
It is good news that so far all is proceeding as planned, and gives hope that all will continue to do so.
An evening pause: A song of thank you.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
The FAA has now made it official and announced that the final approval of Starship environmental reassessment will not occur before the end of February, thus preventing any Starship orbital test flights until the spring, at the earliest.
As previously announced, the FAA had planned to release the Final PEA in on December 31, 2021. However, due to the high volume of comments submitted on the Draft PEA, discussions and consultation efforts with consulting parties, the FAA is announcing an update to the schedule. The FAA now plans to release the Final PEA on February 28, 2022.
When the rumors of a delay were first noted last week, I predicted that “Starship’s first orbital flight will not happen until the latter half of ’22, if then.” That prediction is now almost certainly confirmed.
Nor I am not confident the FAA’s environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s launch facility in Boca Chica will be ready even in February. The problem appears to be that the FAA needs to also get the approval of both NOAA and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife agencies, and both appear to be very hostile to SpaceX’s efforts.
In fact, this is beginning to look like the situation in Hawaii with the Thirty Meter Telescope. There protesters blocked the start of construction, and the government, controlled by Democrats, worked with those protesters to step by step keep that obstruction active and working. If so, SpaceX faces a very dangerous situation, as it appears the Biden administration is about to do the same thing to it.
The religious are 2nd class citizens at Trader Joe’s
Don’t comply: When Trader Joe’s instituted a rule requiring all managers to get the COVID shots, Greg Crawford , a manager there for 26 years, instead got the company to grant him a religious exemption.
The company’s upper management however then banned him from all management meetings, essentially crippling his ability to do his job.
[T]he grocery store’s regional manager informed Crawford that only vaccinated employees would be permitted to attend a required Leader’s Meeting in August; failure to attend the meeting would negatively affect Crawford’s performance review.
The manager also told Crawford that this was a decision by company President and that “There was nothing further to discuss.” The company was essentially penalizing Crawford for his religious beliefs. Under this arrangement, he had no future with the company and would soon either be forced to resign or be fired.
Crawford did not back down, however. » Read more
China earlier this month submitted a complaint against SpaceX to the UN, claiming that the company’s Starlink satellites have twice forced it to adjust the orbit of its space station to avoid a collusion.
The note said the incidents “constituted dangers to the life or health of astronauts aboard the China Space Station”.
“The U.S. … ignores its obligations under international treaties, posing a serious threat to the lives and safety of astronauts,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a routine briefing on Tuesday.
The story became news today because there was suddenly a flurry of outrage against SpaceX on Chinese social media, responding to Lijian’s statement, with much of it very likely astroturf posts prompted by the Chinese government itself.
This announcement likely signals that China is getting ready to launch the next module to that station. During that launch the large core stage of the Long March 5B rocket will reach orbit, but only for a few days. It will then crash uncontrolled somewhere on Earth. The Chinese government knows it is going to get a lot of bad press because of this fact, and is likely making this complaint to try to excuse its own bad actions.
The two issues however are not the same. Satellite orbits are very predictable, and any maneuvers required by China to avoid Starlink satellites were very routine. Moreover, if necessary SpaceX can adjust its own satellite orbits to avoid a collusion.
The crash of the Long March 5B core stage however is due entirely to a bad design that does not allow for any controlled maneuvers. Once the stage’s engines shut down after delivering the station module into orbit, they cannot be restarted, as designed. The stage must fall to Earth in an unpredictable manner, threatening every spot it flies over during that orbital decay.
At this time the actual launch date for that Long March 5B launch, carrying the next station module, has not been announced. The astronauts on the station just completed their second spacewalk, doing work to prepare for the arrival of the next module. Its arrival can’t be too far in the future, and this complaint by China today suggests it will be sooner rather than later. When it happens China will face a flurry of justified criticism, and the Xi government likely plans to use this UN complaint then to deflect that criticism.
In the third test launch of Russia’s new Angara rocket, intended as a replacement of its Proton rocket, the upper stage failed during the launch, placing the dummy satellite in the incorrect orbit that will decay in only a few days.
Launch was a partial failure after the upper stage shut down 2 seconds into the second burn leaving the dummy satellite in an incorrect very low parking orbit of 201 x 179 at an inclination of 63.4 degrees. The dummy spacecraft is likely to re-enter within a few days. The original plan was to use three upper stage burns to take the dummy spacecraft all the way into a “graveyard orbit” a few hundred kilometers above the circa 36,000 km circular geostationary Earth orbit (GEO).
The state-run Russian press TASS has attempted to paint this test flight as a success because the first stage operated as planned, but since the primary purpose of the flight was to test the new upper stage, dubbed Persei, the launch must be considered a failure. As an engineering test, however, this failure simply means they must figure out what went wrong and fly again.
In fact, the only real failure here is the slow pace in which Russia conducts these Angara test flights. This was only the third Angara test launch since 2014, with second occurring six years later in December 2020. That the third test was a year later should be considered unacceptable, and illustrates how the development of this rocket by the Russian government is very comparable to SLS, NASA’s own government rocket: slow, cumbersome, and inefficient.
The failure however means that this launch will not add to the total of successful Russian launches in 2021. The leader board in the 2021 launch race remains the same, with the total launches remaining at 132, tied with 1975 for the most active year in rocketry ever.
50 China
31 SpaceX
23 Russia
7 Europe (Arianespace)
According to an announcement today by Glavcosmos, the government agency that manages Russia’s commercial launches, it expects to launch 10 times next year, with three of those launches managed by Arianespace from French Guiana. This count does not include any Russian military, manned, or government launches, so the overall total will be higher, though it is unlikely to exceed by much this year’s total, and will more likely not match it.
An evening pause: An “electro swing dance” to the song “What will Santa Claus say.” This somehow seems appropriate just after Christmas, after the presents are opened and the partying is done.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
Over the weekend engineers for the James Webb Space Telescope successfully completed a course correction burn that put the telescope on route to is planned location a million miles from Earth.
They also successfully deployed the telescope’s main antenna.
Other steps completed on Webb’s first full day in space included the switch-on of temperature sensors and strain gauges on the telescope, used for monitoring Webb’s thermal and structural parameters, NASA said. The antenna release and first mid-course correction burn set the stage for the next step of Webb’s post-launch commissioning — the deployment and tensioning of the observatory’s tennis court-sized sunshield.
These next steps are likely the most risky part of the telescope’s deployment, as it involves the most moving parts and is the most complex. While similar such unfoldings have been done successfully many times before, they have also been the very prone to failure.
The sunshield must work however for Webb to operate. As an infrared telescope, it essentially detects heat, and if it is not well shielded from sunlight its images will be fogged.
The deployment is presently set to begin tomorrow.
Whites go to the back of the bus in Minnesota
“Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” The Mankato School Board in Minnesota voted unanimously last week to pay its white teachers less than its non-white teachers, while also voting to place them in “work environments based on their race.”
Board members hotly defended the policy vote earlier this month claiming it wasn’t “segregation,” according to AlphaNews on Tuesday.
“When you’re one [minority] of a [white] majority it can be very isolating and lonely,” declared board member Erin Roberts. “To have a support system in place for them is not to segregate them, it is absolutely to support them … It’s not about trying to throw the few [BIPOC] individuals we have into one building. It’s about showing them they aren’t alone.”
“It creates global citizens at the end of the day,” Vice Chair Kenneth Reid ridiculously stated.
Yeah, and I say the sky is orange, and thus it must be so.
This is the same school board that demanded that any person wishing to make a statement to them during comment period must dox themselves, identify themselves and state their address. The result of course is that people stopped speaking up, out of fear that antifa mobs — the modern Democratic Party’s KKK division — might attack them or their homes.
The school board passed this law now because the Minnesota state legislature recently voted an amendment to state law that allows for such discrimination. Since federal law supersedes state law and the federal civil rights acts forbid such discrimination, any white teacher who sued in the federal courts should easily win, while also getting this law ruled illegal.
Of course, we no longer live in “the land of the free and the home of the brave,” but in a land ruled by people who are aggressively working to make it a bankrupt and starving Venezuela. Laws no longer matter and can be ignored. And to treat people equally is now considered evil. If you say “All lives matter” you must be destroyed.
And if you were born white, you are now a second class citizen in Minnesota. Get to the back the bus, boy!
