Author: Robert Zimmerman

Four more flights for Ingenuity in the next eleven days.

9:14 am

According to MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager, the test flight campaign for the Mars helicopter Ingenuity has only about eleven days left, during which they will try to complete full flight program of four more test flights.

The helicopter’s one-month test flight campaign officially began April 3, then the Perseverance rover deployed Ingenuity onto the surface of Mars. “We have a 30 day experiment window, so we have two weeks left,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

She said the helicopter will attempt “increasingly bolder flights” that could travel more than 2,000 feet (600 meters) from its takeoff location. “We do want to push it, and I believe we have enough time to squeeze the next four flights in the next two weeks left.”

The second flight, where the helicopter will go up about 16 feet and then move sideways about seven feet before landing at its take-off point, could happen tomorrow. The third flight, which will travel as much as 150 feet, will follow soon thereafter.

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Weather delays next manned flight on Endeavour capsule one day

9:07 am

NASA and SpaceX have chosen to delay tomorrow’s second manned flight on SpaceX’s Endeavour capsule one day because of “unfavorable weather conditions forecast along the flight path for Thursday.”

The launch is now scheduled for 5:49 am (Eastern) on April 23rd. NASA of course will live stream it, though you will have to listen to a lot of pro-NASA propaganda, even though this flight is almost entirely run by SpaceX using a SpaceX rocket, a SpaceX capsule, and SpaceX launch and landing crews. NASA’s real involvement is as a very interested and involved customer during launch and recovery, and then in charge while the crew is docking or is on board ISS.

This will be the first time astronauts will fly on a reused SpaceX capsule. Endeavour was used for the first manned test flight last spring. That earlier flight also creates an interesting human interest side story on this flight. Of the four person crew, pilot Megan McArthur also happens to be the wife of Bob Behnken, who flew on Endeavour last year.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Liberal black journalist Juan Williams for not being “black enough”

12:15 pm

Blacklists are back and PBS has got ’em: He might be liberal, a Democratic Party cheerleader, and black, but that didn’t stop a PBS host from blacklisting television pundit Juan Williams from appearing on his show because Williams was simply not “black enough”.

Williams alleges the host is on the PBS-affiliated show “This Is America & The World” and that he declined to have Williams talk about race-related issues because he was born in Panama, not America. Williams, a Democrat, said he received a note from the show host telling him about his decision.

“A white TV host recently dismissed me from appearing on his show to discuss race relations by telling me I didn’t qualify because I was born in Panama,” Williams said in his opinion piece in The Hill. “He thinks I’m not Black enough. Seriously.”

When you make race and skin color your number one criteria in all your decisions, then you will begin to make insane and very bigoted decisions like this. Ideas no longer matter. Nor does talent or skill. Only skin color determines who you like or dislike. The only thing that makes this particular example of the left’s constant blacklisting of others for racial reasons different is that it was aimed at a Democrat and a moderate leftist who also happens to not fit the exact racial measure they needed for their narrative.

Nor is this the end. The demand to judge people based solely on their race or ethnicity and the unwillingness of most people to challenge it is leading us directly to race war. Sooner or later the oppressed are not going to take it anymore, especially when some of those oppressed are highly qualified and will view their subjugation as unjust and will have the brains to do something about it.

Americans of all colors have got to start standing up and defying these bigots, loudly. It is the only way we can prevent that race war, and bring us back to the free society we have been for most of the last half century.

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NASA’s choice of Starship proves government now fully embraces capitalism in space

11:50 am

Five years ago, before Donald Trump had even announced he was running for president, before Elon Musk had proposed his Starship/Superheavy rocket, and even before SpaceX had successfully begun to dominate the launch market, Jerry Hendricks at the Center for for New American Security (CNAS) asked me to write a policy paper on the state of the American launch industry, providing some background and more importantly, some recommendations that policy makers in Washington, dependent on that launch industry, could use as guidance in the coming years.

CNAS is a Washington, D.C., think tank that was founded in the middle-2000s by two political Washington insiders, one a Democrat and the other a Republican, with a focus on foreign policy and defense issues and the central goal of encouraging bi-partisan discussion. Hendricks’ area of focus was defense and aerospace matters, and at the time he thought the changes being wrought by SpaceX’s with its partly reusable Falcon 9 rocket required in-depth analysis. He had heard my many reports on this subject on the John Batchelor Show, and thought I could provide him that analysis.

The result was my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space: Private Enterprise and Competition Reshape the Global Aerospace Launch Industry. In it I reviewed and compared what NASA had been getting from its parallel rocket programs, the government-designed and owned Space Launch System (SLS) rocket versus the privately-designed commercial rockets of SpaceX and Orbital ATK (now part of Northrop Grumman). That review produced this very simple but starkly revealing table:

SLS vs Commercial space

From this data, combined with my extensive knowledge as a historian of American history and culture, resulted in the following fundamental recommendations:
» Read more

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Study: U.S. mortality rates suggest background radiation actually beneficial

9:10 am

The uncertainty of science: According to a new study by researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel of mortality rates across the entire United States, people that live in regions of higher background radiation have lifespans on average 2.5 years longer.

Background radiation is an ionizing radiation that exists in the environment because of natural sources. In their study, BGU researchers show that life expectancy is approximately 2.5 years longer among people living in areas with a relatively high vs. low background radiation. Background radiation includes radiation emanating from space, and radiation from terrestrial sources. Since the 1960s, there has been a linear no-threshold hypothesis guiding policy that any radiation level carries some risk. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent around the world to reduce radiation levels as much as possible.

…According to BGU Professors Vadim Fraifeld and Marina Wolfson, along with Dr. Elroei David of the Nuclear Research Center Negev, lower levels of several types of cancers were found when the radiation levels were on the higher end of the spectrum rather than on the lower end. Among both men and women, there was a significant decrease in lung, pancreatic, colon and rectal cancers. Among men, there were additional decreases in brain and bladder cancers. There was no decrease in cervix, breast or prostate cancers or leukemia.

Their data “covered the entire US population of the 3139 US counties, encompassing over 320 million people,” according to their paper’s abstract.

Up until now the assumption has been that any radiation is bad, based not on research but on assumptions gained by the negative consequence of exposure to high radiation. There has been no good data on the consequences of low level background radiation, because it is so hard to gather. The time frames are long and the numbers small, all of which causes the impact of background radiation to be overwhelmed by other factors. This study’s statistical use of the entire U.S. population is an attempt to overcome these obstacles.

This study is statistical, which means it found a correlation between higher radiation and longer lifespans. Correlation however does not prove causation. The study found no direct evidence that humans health benefits from background radiation. We should therefore take these results with a large grain of salt.

At the same time, their extremely large database is quite telling, and adds some weight to their conclusion.

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Video of Ingenuity’s flight, taken by Perseverance

8:39 am

JPL yesterday released a short one minute long video created from images taken by the high resolution mast camera on Perseverance.

You can view the animation here.

Stitched together from multiple images, the mosaic is not white balanced; instead, it is displayed in a preliminary calibrated version of a natural-color composite, approximately simulating the colors of the scene as it would appear on Mars.

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Amazon signs ULA’s Atlas 5 for first 9 Kuiper satellite launches

4:51 pm

Capitalism in space: Amazon today announced that it has signed a launch contract with ULA to use its Atlas 5 rocket for the first 9 Kuiper satellite launches.

The announcement did not say when these flights will take place, nor how many Kuiper satellites will be on each. Amazon’s license with the FAA requires that it launch half its 3,200 satellite constellation by ’26. Also ULA intends to retire the Atlas 5 in only a few years, replacing it with its Vulcan rocket. This suggests that the launches will occur in the next three years.

They better. Starlink is already going operational, and OneWeb is about to. Plus several other internet constellations are in the pipeline. If Amazon wishes to compete it needs to get those satellites in orbit as quickly as possible. Internet customers don’t generally change their servers easily, tending to stick with whom they’ve got. If Starlink and OneWeb scoop up all the best low-hanging internet fruit Amazon will find itself facing an uphill battle getting customers.

The article revealed one tidbit of interest. Rajeev Badyal, Amazon’s VP of technology for the Kuiper project, was one of the managers Elon Musk fired from his Starlink project in 2018 after realizing that that management team was moving far too slowly for his tastes. It appears Jeff Bezos then hired Badyal to run Kuiper.

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Mask madness even as scientists confirm once again their uselessness

2:51 pm

Even as a just published new study has shown once again the utter uselessness of masks to limit the spread of respiratory diseases like COVID-19, the control freaks of our now largely oppressive society are clamping down with new totalitarian rules requiring masks to be worn at all times, no matter what.

First let ‘s look at the study, which was published by the National Center for Biotechnological Information government website, a branch of the National Institute for Health. From the paper:

The physical properties of medical and non-medical facemasks suggest that facemasks are ineffective to block viral particles due to their difference in scales. According to the current knowledge, the virus SARS-CoV-2 has a diameter of 60 nm to 140 nm [nanometers (billionth of a meter)], while medical and non-medical facemasks’ thread diameter ranges from 55 µm to 440 µm [micrometers (one millionth of a meter), which is more than 1000 times larger. Due to the difference in sizes between SARS-CoV-2 diameter and facemasks thread diameter (the virus is 1000 times smaller), SARS-CoV-2 can easily pass through any facemask. In addition, the efficiency filtration rate of facemasks is poor, ranging from 0.7% in non-surgical, cotton-gauze woven mask to 26% in cotton sweeter material. With respect to surgical and N95 medical facemasks, the efficiency filtration rate falls to 15% and 58%, respectively when even small gap between the mask and the face exists.

Clinical scientific evidence challenges further the efficacy of facemasks to block human-to-human transmission or infectivity. A randomized controlled trial (RCT) of 246 participants [123 (50%) symptomatic)] who were allocated to either wearing or not wearing surgical facemask, assessing viruses transmission including coronavirus. The results of this study showed that among symptomatic individuals (those with fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose etc…) there was no difference between wearing and not wearing facemask for coronavirus droplets transmission of particles of >5 µm. Among asymptomatic individuals, there was no droplets or aerosols coronavirus detected from any participant with or without the mask, suggesting that asymptomatic individuals do not transmit or infect other people. This was further supported by a study on infectivity where 445 asymptomatic individuals were exposed to asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 carrier (been positive for SARS-CoV-2) using close contact (shared quarantine space) for a median of 4 to 5 days. The study found that none of the 445 individuals was infected with SARS-CoV-2 confirmed by real-time reverse transcription polymerase.

There is a lot more in the study. Read it all. It shows, based on extensive research, that even when worn properly masks are relatively useless in stopping viral diseases. And since as mandated no one ever uses them properly, they end up becoming likely collectors of pathogens instead, at the very spot where people breath, thus contributing to the spread of infection.

The study also documented the numerous physiological and psychological costs caused by the forced continuous use of masks, from restricting oxygen to causing people to become socially isolated.

The paper’s conclusion:
» Read more

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Spring arrives on the northern polar cap of Mars

1:37 pm

Buzzell dunes and pedestal crater near the Martian north polar ice cap
Click for full image.

Cool image time! It is now spring in the northern hemisphere of Mars, and the first bits of sunlight are finally reaching its north polar ice cap. During the winter, as happens each Martian year, that polar cap of water ice gets covered by a thin mantle of dry ice no more than six feet thick. Moreover, this mantle doesn’t just cover the ice cap, it extends south as far as about 60 degrees latitude, covering the giant sea of dunes that surrounds the ice cap.

When spring comes that mantle begins sublimate away, with its base first turning to gas. When the pressure builds up enough, the gas breaks out through the frozen mantle’s weakest points, usually the crest or base of dunes or ridges, leaving behind a dark splotch caused by the material thrown up from below that contrasts with the bright translucent dry ice mantle.

Each year for the past decade scientists have been using the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to monitor this sublimation process. The photo above, taken on February 24, 2021 and cropped, enlarged, and brightened to post here, marks the start of this year’s monitoring program. Dubbed informally “Buzzell” by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, it shows dunes with a round pedestal crater just right of center. Though almost everything when this picture was taken is still covered by that dry ice mantle, in the lower left is a single splotch, the first breakout of CO2 gas that marks the beginning of the annual disappearance of this dry ice.

Last Martian year I repeatedly posted images of Buzzell to illustrate this annual process. The second image below was taken on April 4, 2019, at about the same comparable time in spring.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Anyone who is white, Christian, or male at Cigna

11:59 am

Cigna training presentation
According to Cigna’s training, these are bad things.

They’re coming for you next: Company documents as well as interviews have confirmed that the health insurance company Cigna actively discriminates against whites in its hiring practices, as well as runs training sessions using Critical Race Theory that aims at making all whites, males, and Christians ashamed of what they are, because by definition such people are automatically racist bigots.

The original story is here. From the first link:
» Read more

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