Author: Robert Zimmerman

An ancient curving channel on Mars

10:30 am

Context image of curving channels
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken by the wide angle context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) in April 2019. It shows an area on Mars where a number of meandering curving channels flow downhill from the west to the east.

Earlier MRO images had already spotted these channels, so when this context image was taken the scientists also took a high resolution image of the same channels, with the white box indicating the area covered by the rotated, cropped, and reduced image below.

Both images are today’s MRO image of the day, where the MRO team notes that “The objective of this observation is to examine a complex network of channels. Some parts of the channels are quite curved.”
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Astra launch failure caused by one of five 1st stage engines shutting down at liftoff

8:57 am

Capitalism in space: According to an Astra press release, its launch failure on August 28th was caused when one of the rocket’s five 1st stage engines shut down one second after liftoff.

One of the five main engines shut down less than one second after liftoff, causing the vehicle to slowly lift off the pad before resuming its trajectory. After approximately two minutes and thirty seconds of flight, the range issued an all engine-shutdown command, ending the flight.

The lack of one engine explains the rocket’s strange take-off, where it initially tilted slightly, shifted sideways, and then straightened up and began rising upward. From that point onward the ground controllers knew the mission would not reach orbit, and were only waiting until it reached a safe altitude to cut off the engines and have the rocket fall into the ocean safely.

While the launch failed, Astra’s engineers should be very satisfied by how the software on the rocket functioned. Rather than shut everything down and crashing into the launchpad fully fueled where it could do a lot of damage, the rocket immediately compensated for the loss of one engine and resumed a stable flight, allowing it to get clear.

This success does not negate the failure however. Astra needs to find out why one engine shut down.

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SpaceX successfully launches cargo Dragon to ISS

12:35 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch cargo Dragon to ISS.

The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing successfully on the drone ship in the Atlantic. The cargo Dragon is making its second cargo mission for NASA. It will dock tomorrow.

This was SpaceX’s first launch since June 30th, a gap of almost two months as they initiated operations of a new drone ship in the Atlantic and shifted an older drone ship to the Pacific. In the next few weeks expect their fast launch pace for ’21 to resume, with at least one Starlink launch and the September 15th Inspiration4 commercial manned orbital flight.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

29 China
21 SpaceX
13 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. now leads China 32 to 29 in the national rankings.

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Astra third launch attempt fails just before 1st stage engine cutoff

3:57 pm

Astra launch, August 28, 2021

Capitalism in space: The third orbital launch attempt of the smallsat rocket company Astra failed about two and a half minutes into flight, just about twenty seconds before the the first stage engine cutoff and stage separation.

It appeared that the first stage engines shut down about twenty seconds early, and then the rocket began tumbling.

I have embedded the live stream below the fold, cued to just before launch. The image to the right is a screen capture about seven seconds after liftoff. Astra’s rocket did a maneuver at launch I’ve never seen before, where it immediately tilted slightly to transition to the side, and then righted itself to begin gaining altitude. In this image the top of the strongback can be seen on the left, with the now upright rocket beginning its flight.

Whether Astra can figure out what went wrong and attempt another flight before the end of this year remains unclear. This was the third launch in their announced three launch test program, with the goal of reaching orbit on the third launch (today’s). They did not meet that goal, though their second test launch in December came extremely close to orbit with no major technical failures.
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Successful orbital engineering test of magnetic space junk removal technology

10:34 am

Capitalism in space: The Japanese-based company Astroscale has successful completed its first test in orbit of a magnetic capture device designed to someday remove for space junk.

Launched on March 22, ELSA-d (short for “End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration”) brought with it to orbit a 37-pound (17 kilograms) cubesat fitted with a magnetic docking plate. During the experiment on Wednesday (Aug. 25), ground controllers first remotely released a mechanical locking mechanism attaching the cubesat to the main 386-pound (175 kg) removal craft, Astroscale said in a statement. The two satellites were still held together by the magnetic system, which is responsible for capturing the debris.

The cubesat was then released completely and recaptured before floating too far away from the main spacecraft. Astroscale said on Twitter that this maneuver was repeated several times. This short demonstration enabled Astroscale to test and calibrate rendezvous sensors, which enable safe approach and capture of floating objects.

Engineers in the coming weeks plan to do even more challenging tests of ELSA, including a capture attempt where the target is made to tumble like an out-of-control satellite.

Eventually the company hopes to sell its target technology to satellite makers so that its satellites will be able to capture them. It already has a deal with OneWeb to develop this technology for its satellites, whereby one of its clean-up satellites could capture a bunch of defunct OneWeb satellites on one flight and deorbit them safely.

Whether this magnetic capture technique could be used on satellites with metal but no specifically designed target is unclear. If so it would place Astroscale a strong position to gain a large portion of the space junk removal business.

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George C. Scott’s Patton speech

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The opening speech from the 1970 movie Patton that captured the character of one of America’s most unique and successful generals.

Patton was a difficult man with little diplomacy, but then, soldiers are not hired to be diplomats. (At least we didn’t when America was the sane country of courageous fighters, as described in this speech.) Yet, as difficult as he was, his philosophy of war was a direct descendant of the war strategy and tactics of Ulysses S. Grant. As Patton is believed to have actually said,

“Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose!”

This was how Grant won the Civil War. It was how Americans fought every war that followed through World War II. Sadly, that philosophy was lost by the bureaucratic military that developed during the Cold War.

If only we had generals and political leaders today who understand this utterly essential approach for winning wars.

One note: The speech’s language at times violates my rules about obscenities. In the context of war and death however I think the use of such language wholly appropriate.

Hat tip Daniel Morris.

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Sweden — land of no lockdowns or mandates — is doing best of all European nations against COVID

4:44 pm

Present European statistics on COVID
Click for full image.

Sweden has been slammed repeatedly by our panic-stricken mob of elitist leaders in politics, academia, and journalism for refusing to impose lockdowns or mask mandates. Instead, they essentially followed the recommendations of the Great Barrington Declaration and focused on protecting the vulnerable (the old and sick) while allowing everyone else (the young and healthy) to live normal lives. (This approach is what western civilization had done for the last two centuries when faced with a new flu epidemic, and only abandoned it in 2020 when our new leftist masters decided they knew better.)

The result was that the COVID virus quickly spread through Sweden’s strong and healthy population, did little harm, but left behind a nation of people who all have a natural immunity to the Wuhan flu and its later strains. Thus, while the rest of Europe — home of totalitarian and mindless governmental restrictions, lockdowns, mask and vaccine mandates — is now dealing with new outbreaks of the Wuhan flu and new deaths, Sweden is not.

The chart above, from the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and annotated by Doug Ross, illustrates this starkly. He also notes this disgusting fact about the bankrupt journalists of today:

It took me well more than 12 seconds to find the website of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, where weekly Covid updates from each country are tabulated. That level of effort finding the numbers apparently is too difficult for Pro Journalists at the HDNY Times*, CCNN, NBS, Politishmo, Yapoo and the rest.

Natural immunity is the best way to protect against the arrival of new flu strains. The drugs that have been developed might do okay, but against respiratory diseases like the coronavirus they have never been a real solution, only a bandaid that is best reserved for that old and sick population who really needs it. This is why we have always advised older people to get flu shots, but not the young.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative student disqualified from student government because he’s conservative

1:22 pm

No free speech at Auburn University
No freedom of speech allowed at Auburn University!

The new dark age of silencing: A conservative student at Auburn University was voted down for government office essentially because it was revealed that he was conservative and Christian, and had expressed entirely reasonable views on Twitter criticizing the Black Lives Matter movement and its racist and Marxist agenda.

A junior nominated for a position on Auburn University’s student government was successfully shot down because he expressed Christian and conservative beliefs on social media.

Stephen Morris was nominated for the position of chief justice of Auburn University’s Student Government Association. To his surprise, at the session where his nomination was to be taken up, held remotely over video, several members of the student senate strongly opposed his nomination.

Morris’s critics accused him of racism over tweets they found offensive, and declared him unfit for service in student government.

The story at the link provides three examples of Morris’s tweets. None show the slightest indication of racism, merely a strong opposition to the agenda of Black Lives Matter, which despite its name seems entirely disinterested in the terrible crime rate in black communities, where innocent blacks are daily killed and robbed by the black criminals in their midst. Instead, all BLM cares about is eliminating any police protection for those innocent blacks, and for gaining as power and money for itself.
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Another mountain view from Curiosity

12:33 pm

Low resolution panorama
Click for full resolution panorama. The original images can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

I hope my readers won’t get tired of seeing these mountain views from Curiosity, but I can’t get enough of them.

The image above is a panorama I’ve created from six photos taken by Curiosity’s right navigation camera yesterday. The box marks the location of that spectacular outcrop I highlighted in the previous mountain view five days ago. The red dotted line shows the rover’s upcoming planned route. The white cross indicates the pavement bedrock where the science team hopes to next drill.

For scale, Navarro Mountain is rises about 400 feet from where the rover presently sits. The peak of Mount Sharp is actually not visible, blocked by its near white flank on the panorama’s left edge. That peak is still 13,000 feet higher up from where the rover presently sits.

The rise of rocks next to the words “entering Gediz Vallis” is actually only probably five to ten feet high, as it is very close to the rover.

Curiosity’s travels continue to get more and more exciting to follow.

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FAA’s space bureaucracy chief touts desire to limit his agency’s regulatory fist

10:18 am

Wayne Monteith, the man in charge of the FAA’s office of commercial space — which is tasked with regulating commercial space — revealed in a speech on August 25, 2021 that his goal is to speed that industry’s growth, not hinder it with odious regulations.

Wayne R. Monteith, a retired Air Force general who served for years in space billets in Colorado Springs is now the FAA’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation. He told a Space Symposium crowd at The Broadmoor Wednesday that to a large extent, he’s trying to keep his agency out of the way of the rush to space. “A regulatory agency can either be an accelerator or an inhibitor of industry,” he said. “We choose to be an accelerator.”

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Don’t be so sure. While right now Monteith noted that the agency is taking a laissez-faire approach to anyone who wants to fly in space, acting only to make sure space accidents will not harm “the uninvolved public,” he also said this in his speech:

Monteith warned, though, that mishaps for manned space flight that escalate to what he called “catastrophe,” have consequences. “The worst case is a catastrophic failure,” he said. “Then, we will regulate.”

In other words, he recognizes that if he tried now to impose his bureaucratic will on commercial space, it would not fly politically. What he really needs to expand his power is some space accident, a crisis you might say, that he can then use to convince others that he should be controlling things more.

Based on the response of the press, public, and American culture in the past half century, his thinking is quite sound. Routinely since World War II, as soon as something goes wrong in any field of endeavor the American public and political class has repeatedly wanted the government to move in and take greater control, under the false premise that somehow the government can prevent further failures.

Instead, we have accomplished less, and fueled the rise of an all-powerful bureaucracy capable and quite willing to squelch achievement. This is the pattern that Monteith is relying on, and based on recent history, he is entirely justified in believing so.

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