April 11, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Blue Origin releases another PR video touting its wonderfulness
This video is absolutely worth watching (if you can tolerate the smug self-righteous blather), because it reveals quite starkly the utter vapidness of the company. There is no content here, just empty feel-good propaganda. At no point does the video tell us specifically what Blue Origin is doing to achieve its goals, strongly suggesting it is failing to do anything.
And this almost a decade after the company announced it was building its orbital New Glenn rocket, which is still at least two years from launch. Think about what SpaceX has achieved in that same time.
- Virgin Orbit seeking expedited bankruptcy sale
If successful the company could be auctioned off by May.
- The new director at Goddard took her oath of office on a copy of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
Sagan was an avowed leftist. No surprise that a government official would swear and oath by him.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either. IMPORTANT! If you donate enough to get a book, please email me separately to tell me which book you want and the address to mail it to.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Blue Origin releases another PR video touting its wonderfulness
This video is absolutely worth watching (if you can tolerate the smug self-righteous blather), because it reveals quite starkly the utter vapidness of the company. There is no content here, just empty feel-good propaganda. At no point does the video tell us specifically what Blue Origin is doing to achieve its goals, strongly suggesting it is failing to do anything.
And this almost a decade after the company announced it was building its orbital New Glenn rocket, which is still at least two years from launch. Think about what SpaceX has achieved in that same time.
- Virgin Orbit seeking expedited bankruptcy sale
If successful the company could be auctioned off by May.
- The new director at Goddard took her oath of office on a copy of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
Sagan was an avowed leftist. No surprise that a government official would swear and oath by him.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either. IMPORTANT! If you donate enough to get a book, please email me separately to tell me which book you want and the address to mail it to.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
I personally met Sagan as a young man. He was not only a leftist, but a jerk.
And speaking of jerks, here’s op-Ed columnist John M. Crisp who says we have no great reason to go to Mars, because:
1. We should not consider Mars as a lifeboat for after we have exhausted our planet, and;
2. Robots could explore better.
This guy mentioned Elon Musk dismissively, but avoided any reference to Musk’s singular motivation, one that he has stated clearly hundreds of times: to preserve human life from extinction by human or cosmic accident.
I can only conclude that the purpose of this piece was to cheapen the public’s opinion about the value of SpaceX plans, and to do so by avoiding the mention of the widely publicized motivation for them. There is a technical term for this: it is called “lying”.
Ps. If the writer had included an email address, I would have told him so directly!
In case Jay the Stringer has not passed it along already, here’s a new set of developments over at one of Blue Origin’s (faster working) competitors: Relativity Space, which recently had its (largely) successful maiden test flight of its Terra 1 launcher.
• They’re pivoting immediately to Terran R, rather than continuing any test campaign with Terran 1
• Terran R is getting bigger due to market demand (up to 33.5 metric tons to low-Earth orbit!)
• Terran R’s second stage will now be expendable, at least for several years
• Terran R’s design will be relying somewhat less on additive manufacturing than initially planned
• A heavy lift war is looming among ULA, Blue, and Relativity to fill the not-SpaceX market slot(s).
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/04/relativity-space-is-moving-on-from-the-terran-1-rocket-to-something-much-bigger/
We live in exciting times for space!
Hello Ray,
If you think Crisp is bad, you should see the argument against Mars being advanced by Mary-Jane Rubenstein over at Vox this week. We should not settle Mars (or any other planet) because – get this – the souls of the ancestors of Australian Aborigines dwell there! Also, Manifest Destiny sucks.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2023/4/3/23667361/moon-artemis-nasa-elon-musk-jeff-bezos-space-colonization-exploration
I personally met Sagan as a young man. He was not only a leftist, but a jerk.
My aunt used to work at JPL. When I was in high school, I went out to visit her, and she took me on a tour. I was taken aback to encounter a contingent of old JPL scientists who viscerally disliked Sagan, who they saw as an overrated irritating showoff.
Having never met Sagan myself, I can’t speak to him being a jerk. But it does seem that not everyone he interacted with felt warm and fuzzy about him. I still have a bit of a soft spot for COSMOS.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
Also Carl Sagan: The Kuwaiti oil fires will cause a global nuclear winter.
Richard M: I just got up and am doing my morning review, looking for stories. Thank you for this link. I will post on the main page.
Ray Van Dune wrote: “op-Ed columnist John M. Crisp who says we have no great reason to go to Mars, because:
1. We should not consider Mars as a lifeboat for after we have exhausted our planet, and;
2. Robots could explore better.”
Of course we should not consider Mars as a lifeboat, because we are not going to exhaust the Earth, and we certainly cannot turn Earth into something worse than Mars.
As for robots being better explorers, perhaps we should compare our martian probes — the satellites, landers, and rovers — to the Lewis & Clark expedition. Robert gives us daily articles showing a martian terrain or satellite photograph, and he points out how little our scientists have gleaned from these decades-long explorations and how we can only know more by exploring in person. Like Lewis & Clark did.
If we don’t plan to going now in favor of planning to going someday in the far distant future, what is the point of planning to go at all? If we don’t plan on going to Mars, then what is the point of exploring that planet?
Humanity would not be where we are today if our ancestors had said to each other, “Let’s not leave Africa, because the rest of the world is too cold and hostile. Anyway, we won’t find anything that we don’t already have here, and we haven’t exhausted Africa, not by a long shot.”
We know how to travel interplanetary distances. We know how to keep a space habitat habitable for two decades. We know how to get out of our space habitats and explore. Why wait? Why send robots when we can go ourselves and experience the grandeur of the various places?
Richard M linked to an interview.
“I talked to {Mary-Jane] Rubenstein about the fear of screwing up space like we’ve screwed up Earth: Is that really a fear of trampling on space’s own intrinsic value, or is it more a fear about human nature?”
What a question, considering that we have not screwed up Earth. The air is still blue and breathable, the water is still blue and drinkable, the birds continue to fly and sing, and we haven’t run out of food, as Paul Ehrlich said we would half a century ago. We now have three times the global population without famine.
What intrinsic value does space have if we do not take advantage of it? What value did it have before we had rockets to get there?
“If you talk to indigenous people — I’m thinking particularly of Inuit cosmology, of Ojibwe cosmology, of Bawaka cosmology from Australia — they will tell you that outer space isn’t empty at all, that it actually is inhabited, that there are indigenous people there: their ancestors. For the Bawaka People, when people die, they’re actually carried up into the Milky Way alongside the stars.”
For Inuit cosmology, we are already in space, so that is already spoiled. For the Bawaka People, the Milky Way is not the Moon or Mars, so those two places are still available to us.
And what about all the rest of us, those who believe we go to heaven above? Why aren’t we also concerned about space travel and the use and exploration of space? Could it be that Rubenstein hasn’t spoken to those indigenous people that she is using to change the way we see space? Could it be that these people also do not think that going to space or mining planets or asteroids will affect anyone’s ancestors? Could it be that Rubenstein is lying to us just as Ehrlich lied half a century ago?