The Insane Engineering of the X-15
An evening pause: This history, largely forgotten, seems especially significant now that the first wholly commercial space flights are about to happen.
Hat tip Lazarus Long.
Author: Robert Zimmerman
Tampering and serious discrepancies found in Arizona election audit
The audit of the more than two million votes cast in Maricopa County, Arizona, in November 2020 is not yet complete, but auditors in the past week have revealed that they have already uncovered significant evidence of tampering and major discrepancies that throw great doubt on the victory given to Joe Biden.
First, the auditors forced the county election board to admit that the voting machines were not protected by a password at the administrative level, thus allowing anyone to change anything on every machine, during the vote count.
That doesn’t prove fraud or election tampering, it only proves that it was amazingly easy for it to happen.
Second, it appears from further work that something very fishy was going on. The auditors for example have discovered that Maricopa County officials illegally tampered with the voter database records before turning them over to the auditors, including the deletion of an entire database.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Conservative commencement speakers at all American universities
Burning witches: What most colleges want to do to conservatives.
Blacklists are back and academia’s got ’em: Though for years universities have routinely favored leftist or Democratic Party politicians in picking their annual graduation commencement speakers, 2021 is turning out to be a record year in academia’s effort to blackball conservatives.
In its annual survey, Young America’s Foundation [YAF] said that of the 100 top schools that have identified their speaker, 37 are featuring notable and national liberals and one a conservative. By comparison to other years, the group said that 2021 may be the worst-ever showing for conservatives.
You can see the full list here [pdf]. As noted at the YAF announcement,
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Roscosmos announces two commercial tourist flights to ISS
Capitalism in space: Roscosmos, the government corporation that controls of all of Russia’s space industry, announced today that it will be flying two different commercial tourist flights to ISS, both occurring before the end of this year.
The first will take place in October.
Roscosmos [is] sending an actress and a director to the ISS in October with the aim of making the first feature film in space. The film, whose working title is “Challenge,” is being co-produced by the flamboyant head of Roscosmos, Dmitry Rogozin, and state-run network Channel One.
The second will take place in December, and will fly Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa (the man who has already purchased a Moon mission on SpaceX’s Starship) and his assistant Yozo Hirano in a Soyuz capsule to ISS for twelve days.
Let’s review the upcoming tourist flights now scheduled:
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Senate committee mandates NASA award 2nd lunar lander contract
More crap from Congress: A Senate committee has approved a new NASA authorization that requires the agency to award a second lunar lander contract — in addition to the one given to SpaceX — even though that authorization gives NASA no additional money to pay for that second contract.
This provision was inserted by senator Maria Cantwell (D-Washington). Washington state also happens to be the state where one of the rejected companies, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, is located. I wonder how much cash Bezos’ has deposited in Cantwell’s bank account.
This provision not only does not give NASA any cash to build two lunar landers, what NASA dubs the Human Landing System (HLS), it forces NASA to violate other laws.
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Company offers luxurious 3-day astronaut training vacations
Capitalism in space: For those considering spending millions to buy an orbital tourist flight from SpaceX, a new company, Orbite, is now offering for only $29,000 a three day high-end astronaut training vacation that will include a short zero-gravity flight on an airplane.
[CEO Jason] Andrews and Orbite’s other co-founder, French-born tech entrepreneur Nicolas Gaume, have set the schedule for astronaut orientation courses that’ll include virtual-reality simulations, a zero-G flight and a high-G flight — all designed to provide a taste of space without tying the participant down to a particular program.
The first session will take place Aug. 23-27 at La Co(o)rniche, a five-star boutique hotel on France’s Atlantic coast that’s owned by Gaume’s family. Three other sessions will be offered at the Four Seasons Resort in Orlando, Fla., starting on Nov. 11, Nov. 25 and Dec. 2. Each session is limited to 10 participants.
Zero Gravity Corp. and Europe’s Air Zero G by Novespace will fly the participants on airplanes that can provide measured doses of weightlessness, about 30 seconds at a time. Other subcontractors will put them in the cockpits of planes such as P-51 Mustangs or Extra 330LX’s, which can deliver multiple G’s of acceleration.
In essence these training sessions are nothing more than a dressed up expensive vacation, though surely unique.
None of this training will qualify someone to fly in space, but it will give potential orbital and suborbital customers a taste of what to expect, which should help them decide if they want to cough up the bigger bucks necessary for the real deal.
More delays for Webb telescope?
An issue with the fairing release on the last two Ariane 5 launches has not only paused use of that rocket since August 2020, it might cause another delay in the planned October 31, 2021 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope.
In a statement to SpaceNews, Arianespace acknowledged that “post-flight analyses conducted on two recent Ariane 5 launches have indicated the occurrence of a less than fully nominal separation of the fairing, however with no adverse impact on the Ariane 5 flights in question.”
The company did not elaborate on the problem, but industry sources familiar with the issue said that, on both the August 2020 launch and the previous Ariane launch in February 2020, the separation of the faring induced vibrations into the payload stack well above acceptable limits. Neither incident damaged any of the payloads, but raised concerns about the effect on future missions, including JWST.
Moreover, Arianespace has two Ariane 5 launches on its schedule that are supposed to launch before Webb. If those are delayed it puts a further squeeze on the Webb launch date.
Meanwhile, the final checkouts of the Webb telescope have been proceeding, including a successful test of the unfolding of the telescope’s segmented mirror.
After a more than decade of delays and budget overruns — raising this telescope’s budget from 1/2 billion to $10 billion — it appears that Webb’s final schedule delay might occur not because of the telescope but because of the rocket.
In addition, the issue at Arianespace appears to be seriously impacting that company’s ’21 launch schedule, having failed to launch any Ariane 5 rockets so far this year.
May 12, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Alizee – J`en Ai marre
An evening pause: Performed live 2004, when such joyous concerts were possible.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Rocket Lab launch on May 15 will attempt a second ocean recovery of 1st stage
Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab’s next planned launch on May 15th will attempt a repeat of the ocean recovery of their Electron rocket’s 1st stage, as they did after a November 2020 launch.
The goal of such work is to help transition the two-stage Electron from an expendable vehicle, as it was originally designed, to a rocket with a reusable first stage. And inspection of the recovered booster from “Return to Sender” suggests that this vision is no pipe dream. “We are more kind of bullish on this than ever before,” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck said during a teleconference with reporters on Tuesday (May 11). “We reentered on a very aggressive corridor, we had no upgraded heat shield, and we still got [the booster] back in remarkable condition.”
Indeed, some parts of that rocket will fly again; the propellant pressurization system from the “Return to Sender” first stage has been incorporated into the “Running Out of Toes” Electron [launching May 15th], Beck said. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words are quite remarkable. As far as I know, SpaceX never reused any part of a Falcon 9 first stage that was recovered in the ocean.
Rocket Lab also hopes to reduce any damage further by using new equipment on their ship for getting the stage out of the water. In addition, they have added heat shielding to the stage that should also reduce damage during its fall back to Earth.
Finally, on the next flight or so they will test something they are calling a “decelerator,” designed to slow the stage down during that fall. They are not saying what this decelerator is, which suggests it is some form of new engineering.
If all goes right, they hope to make the first snatch by helicopter of a first stage before it hits the ocean sometime next year.
Martian glacial run-off?
For original images click here and here.
Today’s cool image provides us a glimpse at the carved canyons created when the mid-latitude glaciers on Mars were active in the past and slowly flowing downhill into the section of the northern lowland plains dubbed Acidalia Planitia.
The photo to the right is a mosaic of two images taken by the context camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here. The mosaic shows a region at the very edge of Acidalia Planitia at latitude 43 degrees north.
Below is a close-up of the area in the white box, taken by MRO’s high resolution camera on February 28, 2021, as well as a global map marking the location of this image at the very edge of the glacier country found in the chaos terrain of Deuteronilus Mensae.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Mom criticizes school board, gets blacklisted by Facebook & Instagram, fights back and wins
Doesn’t exist at Facebook or Instagram.
Blacklists are back and Facebook’s got ’em: When Gordana Schifanelli, a mother in a Maryland school district who is also an immigrant from communist Yugoslavia, created webpages criticizing the pro-Black Lives Matter indoctrination being introduced in the schools by school superintendent Andrea M. Kane, both Facebook and Instagram moved quickly to censor her, while others attempted to destroy her career.
The response from Big Tech and leftists in her community would have made Tito proud, Mrs. Schifanelli said referring to Josip Broz, the late dictator of Yugoslavia.
First they shut down her personal Facebook page.
“So I said, ‘OK, I’ll create my own,” she said. Facebook and Instagram shut down the “Kent Island Patriots” and “Maryland Eastern Shore Patriots” pages, too. When her 17-year-old son tried to start a Facebook page, he was blocked, she said.
The people seeking to censor Mrs. Schifanelli’s opposition to left-wing politics, many of whom did not have children in the public school system, attacked her as a racist. They leveled their accusations with the Maryland Bar Association and at the U.S. Naval Academy, where she teaches economics and law twice a week.
Another target of theirs did lose his job, and he is a plaintiff in a separate lawsuit.
Unlike many of the other stories I have chronicled in this daily column, this one has ended with what looks like a total victory for Mrs. Schifanelli.
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