Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble – Riviera Paradise
An evening pause: Hat tip Cotour.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Amazon picks rocket startup ABL to launch 1st two prototype Kuiper satellites
Capitalism in space: Amazon has chosen the smallsat startup rocket company ABL to launch its first two prototype Kuiper satellites, with that launch targeted for ’22.
KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 will reach orbit via the RS1, a new rocket developed by California-based ABL Space Systems. Amazon also announced today that it has signed a multi-launch deal with ABL to provide these early Project Kuiper launches.
The 88-foot-tall (27 meters) RS1 is capable of launching 2,975 pounds (1,350 kilograms) of payload to LEO, according to its ABL specifications page. ABL is charging $12 million for each launch of the two-stage rocket. The RS1 has not flown yet, but ABL has said that it aims to conduct a debut launch from Alaska’s Pacific Spaceport Complex before the end of 2021.
Earlier this year, Amazon announced that it had signed a deal with United Launch Alliance (ULA), whose Atlas V rocket will loft operational Project Kuiper craft on nine different launches.
Does anyone notice what rocket company has not won these contracts, even though its owner is also Amazon’s founder and biggest shareholder? That’s right, as far as I can tell, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket has apparently not won any contracts to launch Amazon’s Kuiper satellites. Notice also that the deal with ULA uses its Atlas-5 rocket, not its new Vulcan rocket, even though ULA wants Vulcan to replace the Atlas-5 beginning in ’22.
Since both New Glenn and Vulcan depend on Blue Origin’s troubled BE-4 rocket engine, these contracts strongly suggest that the engine’s technical problems have not yet been solved, and that neither rocket will be flying in ’22 as both companies have promised.
Dragon manned launch delayed again
NASA announced today that the manned launch of four astronatus to ISS on SpaceX’s Endurance spacecraft has been delayed again, pushed back to November 6tth because of a “minor medical issue”.
The agency says one of the astronauts has a โminor medical issue.” The issue is not a medical emergency and not related to COVID-19, according to NASA.๏ปฟ
The launch is now set for 11:36 pm (Eastern) that evening.
Curiosity looks back across the alien landscape of Mars
Click for image.
Cool image time! The photo above, the first of 21 identical images taken by Curiosity’s right navigation camera, taken at intervals of about thirteen seconds on October 31st, was probably snapped as part of an effort to spot a moving dust devil. At the resolution available to my software, I see nothing when I compare all 21 photos.
What I do see is a remarkably alien landscape. In the distance can be seen the mountains that mark the rim of Gale Crater, 30-plus miles away. On the image’s right edge you can see the rising slope heading up to the peak of Mount Sharp about 13,000 feet higher.
In the center are those blobby mesas that make this terrain look so strange. For the past decade Curiosity has been traveling from the floor of the crater on the picture’s far left to circle around that dark sand dune sea to climb up the mountain slopes in the foreground in front of those mesas.
It is now heading to the right, into the mountains that make up Mount Sharp. Such a view of the floor of Gale Crater will thus be for the next few years more difficult to catch, as the mountains themselves will block the view. Assuming the rover survives long enough, it will have to climb much higher before it can get such an expansive view again.
Today’s blacklisted American: Leftist actor/rapper Icecube forced from Sony film rather than get a COVID shot
Ice Cube: now an unclean non-person
Original photo by Adam Bielawski
They’re coming for you next: Actor and rapper Icecube, who has throughout his career been linked to leftist and pro-black racial causes, has pulled out as one of the leads of a Sony film because he refuses to comply with the film company’s COVID shot mandate.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, which broke the story,
Ice Cube has departed Sonyโs upcoming comedy, Oh Hell No, in which he wouldโve co-starred with Jack Black, after declining a request from producers to get vaccinated, sources tell The Hollywood Reporter.
Apparently this decision has cost him a $9 million check.
The first link above notes this important point about Ice Cube:
» Read more
Sunspot update: Sun continues its higher than predicted activity
With the beginning of a new month comes my monthly sunspot update, based on NOAA’s most recent monthly graph of sunspot activity. That graph is below, annotated to show the previous solar cycle predictions and thus provide context. It has now been extended from last month to include the Sun’s sunspot activity in October.
Sunspot activity in October continued to be higher than predicted, though the month saw a slight drop from September. Even so, the number of sunspots seen on the Sun’s facing hemisphere in October were the most since August of 2016, when the Sun was ramping down to solar minimum.
An example of good public school education
Those who are regular readers of this webpage know that I generally have a low opinion of the American public school system, based on ample evidence. It generally fails to educate while working to abuse and indoctrinate young children in ways that are so ugly and inappropriate that often the administrators and teachers involved could actually be charged with child abuse.
Today I am instead going to provide an example of a public school doing right by its students. On Saturday I was invited to watch as an afterschool engineering group, run by John Morris, the Engineering & Mathematics teacher at Casa Grande Union High School in Arizona, went out to launch model rockets that they had built themselves.
The launch to the right was the first of the day. The rest of the post below is image oriented, to give you a feel of what it involved in teaching young high school students how to make and launch small rockets. That activity, while involving relatively simple engineering, provides them the right grounding for learning how to work hard, make sure they do the work right, and learning that failure is really only a step towards success.
» Read more
Astronomers: If there are artificial Dyson spheres out there, we can detect them
In a preprint science paper published on October 26, 2021, astronomers review the impact a Dyson sphere might have on its central star and conclude that modern astronomical instruments should be able to identify these changes. From the abstract:
The search for signs of extraterrestrial technology, or technosignatures, includes the search for objects which collect starlight for some technological use, such as those composing a Dyson sphere. These searches typically account for a star’s light and some blackbody temperature for the surrounding structure. However, such a structure inevitably returns some light back to the surface of its star, either from direct reflection or thermal re-emission. In this work, we explore how this feedback may affect the structure and evolution of stars, and when such feedback may affect observations. We find that in general this returned light can cause stars to expand and cool. Our MESA models show that this energy is only transported toward a star’s core effectively by convection, so low mass stars are strongly affected, while higher mass stars with radiative exteriors are not. Ultimately, the effect only has significant observational consequences for spheres with very high temperatures (much higher than the often assumed ~300 K) and/or high specular reflectivity. Lastly, we produce color-magnitude diagrams of combined star-Dyson sphere systems for a wide array of possible configurations.
A plain-language description of the paper can be found here, which summarizes this work as follows:
This study shows that Dyson spheres can result in measurable changes to stellar properties. Megastructures have long been confined to science fiction, imagination and certain video games. However, if there are indeed Dyson spheres out there waiting to be found, we could soon be in a position to find them.
Enrollment decline continues in urban public schools
Some good news: In reporting today that the Chicago public school system this year lost 10,000 students, the Associated Press story also said this:
The enrollment decline, which has been happening each year for the past decade, comes as other big city districts including New York and Los Angeles have seen enrollment declines this year as well. … The enrollment drop this academic year is due to students moving elsewhere, going to private schools or homeschooling, according to recent district data.
The story also noted that this declines appears to be occurring among all ethnic groups, since the school demographics remained unchanged.
Finally, being the Associated Press and thus married to supporting governments run by Democrats, the story had to allow the final word to the city’s Democratic Party mayor as well as the unions that have routinely backed her:
Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the drop a โminor miracle,โ saying she was surprised enrollment didnโt decline even more considering the COVID-19 pandemic. โWe had to quickly transition to remote learning. We know that didnโt work for a lot of families. Thereโs been a lot of challenges and struggles that have been revealed throughout the course of this pandemic that hit our most vulnerable residents the hardest, many of whomโ have children attending CPS, Lightfoot said.
Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union blamed underfunded schools, particularly in largely Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, as a major driver.
That parents might have finally gotten disgusted with the government’s utter failure to teach reading, writing, or arithmetic does not occur to these political geniuses. Nor does it occur to them that their passion for forcing masks and racial indoctrination on little children might have also contributed to the decline in enrollment.
No, for leftists their failures are always explained by either a lack of funding or circumstances beyond their control. Give us more money and all will be well! We promise!
It appears however that an increasing number of parents are no longer buying these arguments. Thank goodness.
Dragon crew launch to ISS delayed due to weather
The early morning launch on October 31st of the next manned flight of SpaceX’s Endurance capsule to ISS, has been delayed because of poor weather downrange from the launch site.
The bad weather could have interfered with recovery operations should a launch abort had been necessary and the capsule was forced to land in the Atlantic.
The launch has now been rescheduled for 1:10 am (Eastern) on November 3rd.
Hubble in safe mode again
According to NASA’s Twitter feed for the Hubble Space Telescope, it went into safe mode earlier this week because of “issues with internal communications.”
Hubbleโs science instruments went into safe mode on Monday after experiencing synchronization issues with internal spacecraft communications. Science observations have been temporarily suspended while the team investigates the issue. The instruments remain in good health.
Much of the press is using that lovely buzzword of bureaucrats, calling this a “glitch.” The goal of that word is to make the problem seem minor and no big deal.
It can’t be minor and no big deal however if the telescope shut down six days ago and remains out of service. This is not a “glitch.” This is a serious issue that is taking time to resolve.
Furthermore, I get more concerned when no further information is provided. As far as I can so far find, the quote above is the only information NASA has released. And that information is remarkably vague and uninformative.
October 29, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
» Read more