Category: Behind The Black

OneWeb offers its satellite constellation broadband service to the maritime industry

9:06 am

With its full constellation of 634 satellites in orbit, OneWeb has now made its satellite constellation broadband service available to the maritime industry.

With 634 OneWeb operational satellites now in orbit, the OneWeb constellation is complete and fully operational down to 35 degrees latitude. OneWeb will have the final ground stations completed and operational requirements in place, ensuring the company remains on track to deliver full global maritime services by the end of the year. Now OneWeb will start selling services to the maritime industry, via its specialist maritime distribution partners.

OneWeb and its partners have also developed a range of hardware terminal products which are available from trusted maritime communications providers Intellian and Kymeta. Offering hardware terminal products from two established providers with different form factors enables greater choice for customers.

More information here.

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NASA names winners in annual student rocket competition

9:01 am

NASA yesterday named the winners in its annual student rocket launch competition, which took place at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama on April 15, 2023.

The live stream of the competition is available here, cued to when the rockets begin launching.

The number of awards is a bit too many, making it seem that NASA wanted to make sure every team got some form of participation award. Nonetheless, these students demonstrated that they will soon be building real rockets, as part of the new and emerging rocket industry.

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Heart – Crazy on You

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I posted this same song in 2022 from a different performance during the same 1977 tour. This version however was recorded as part of a documentary and includes some backstage footage that is definitely worth watching.

Has tip Rex Ridenoure, who notes that “Heart was the first rock band with female leads who also wrote all their own songs.”

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On the radio-CANCELLED

4:50 pm

UPDATE: Due to technical problems outside of David Livingston’s control, the show tonight had to be cancelled. We will try to reschedule for another show within a week or so.

Original post:
——————
Tonight I will be doing another long appearance on the Space Show with David Livingston, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). Please feel free to call in, as it is always more fun to talk to someone directly than to answer email questions.

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The explanation as to why Democrats today are fearless in proposing insane policies

1:58 pm

How the change in Don Lemon in the past ten years reveals why Democrats are no longer afraid to propose insane policies
Don Lemon unwittingly reveals the Democrats’
assumed grip on power

A recent post at ZeroHedge made a big deal about how Don Lemon’s positions so drastically changed in less than a decade. As the article correctly noted, the positions Lemon took in 2013 would have had Don Lemon in 2023 label himself a white supremacist.

The video [from 2013] shows Lemon talking about what the black community should do to fix its problems, including stop littering, and encouraging kids to try harder in school. The host also extols the virtues of marriage, and warns about the problem of absent fathers, asserting “just because you can have a baby doesn’t mean you should.”

Lemon even tells young black men to stop using the N word and to pull up their pants and stop walking around with their asses hanging out looking like prison bitches.

If you dare say these things now you are called a racist and a white supremacist (no matter your skin color) exerting your white privilege. The Don Lemon of 2023 himself has done this exact thing.

What the article found most shocking however was the speed in which these things changed. As noted by this tweet:

It’s terrifying how fast society fell off the cliff

10 years ago Obama, Hillary, and Biden were defining marriage as “a man and a woman”

10 years ago Don Lemon was telling black people “pull your pants up”

10 years ago Dems only supported “safe, legal, and rare” abortions

Why? How did it become okay for Democrats and leftists to suddenly in less than a few years go from defending normal sex and marriage to supporting the genital mutilation of young children and to support cross-dressing men changing in women’s locker rooms? Why have inner city Democratic Party politicians gone from trying to arrest shoplifters in order to at least maintain a semblance of law to passing laws making illegal for any employees at a retail store from stopping shoplifting in any way, while simultaneously advocating “defunding the police” and routinely releasing murderers and criminals without charge?

How is any of this even possible in a democratic society? Shouldn’t Democrats be worried that their insane policies might be offending the vast majority of normal people who vote?

The answer lies in a false assumption most conservatives and ordinary people still have about our nation. » Read more

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Martian dust devil where none had been before

11:24 am

Dust devil on Mars
Click for original image.

Today’s cool Mars image is especially cool because it is of the exact same place on Mars I had featured in a picture only a little more than one month ago. I return to this spot only a month later because the location was yesterday’s featured captioned image from the high resolution camera team of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The difference is that this time the camera captured a dust devil there that wasn’t there previously. From the caption:

The dust devil is casting a shadow, which can be used to estimate its height. This image is part of ongoing monitoring activities by HiRISE of seasonal activities on Mars.

Over the years, HiRISE has observed many dust devils. Just like on Earth, dust devils develop when the Sun heats up the ground such that it warms the air directly above it. When air heats up its density decreases causing it to rise up while colder air sinks down driving local convection.

If the region is windy, the wind my end up rotating the “convection cells” caused by the vertical motion of air leading to development of a dust devil. Since the main requirements for development of such features are the presence of dust and a warm ground, we focus our monitoring of dust devils in regions on Mars that are known to be dusty (like Syria Planum), and during the late spring and summer time, when we expect the ground to be warm.

» Read more

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Hubble snaps picture of another jellyfish galaxy

10:05 am

Another jellyfish galaxy
Click for original image.

Astronomers today released another picture of a jellyfish galaxy taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, with that picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here. From the caption:

The jellyfish galaxy JO206 trails across this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, showcasing a colourful star-forming disc surrounded by a pale, luminous cloud of dust. A handful of bright stars with criss-cross diffraction spikes stand out against an inky black backdrop at the bottom of the image. JO206 lies over 700 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Aquarius.

This image is the sixth and final such photograph in this survey. You can view all of these images here. The study has found that star formation does not seem to be significantly different inside the galaxy versus the tentacles that stretch out beyond due to pressure from the intergalactic material. This suggests that the influence of this intergalactic material on the formation of stars is relatively minor.

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NASA: Psyche asteroid mission now targeting October ’23 launch

9:51 am

A report [pdf] from NASA on the steps taken by JPL to get the Psyche asteroid mission back on track after it failed to meet its launch date last fall says those steps are working, and the spacecraft should now succeed in meeting its new October ’23 launch date.

Both the report and today’s press release are filled with vague PR blather interspersed with complementing JPL for addressing the issues, including hiring about a dozen more people to get the main software issue that had prevented last year’s launch solved. I noticed one point however that was not mentioned clearly in the press release nor had been made clear in the earlier investigation report that today’s newly released report labels as “COVID-19 Related” issues.

The return to majority in-person work has made a tremendous difference in restoring visibility and informal communications across the project. Drop-in meetings, social coffee hours, off-site intensives, and individuals “walking the floor” have improved team interaction, problem-solving, efficiency, and trust. The team is also making judicious use of remote and hybrid access options as appropriate to ensure flexibility while not compromising their collaboration.

In other words, the panic over Wuhan had so restricted in-person contact at JPL that it had hampered the project’s development. Based on the vague language used to describe almost everything else mentioned in this new report, it appears that this issue more than anything else contributed the launch delay. Not surprisingly, no one at NASA, JPL, Caltech, or in the government wishes to make this admission bluntly. It would illustrate once again the foolishness of the lockdown policies imposed during the panic by the government and academia.

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Tianzhou unmanned freighter completes month-long free flight, re-docks with Tiangong-3

9:30 am

Engineers today successfully re-docked a Tianzhou unmanned freighter to China’s Tiangong-3 space station after 33 days flying in formation with the station.

As is usual, China released no information about the reasoning behind this free flight, though some reasons are obvious. The station has two docking ports, and during that 33-day time period the station also completed a crew swap, with one Shenzhou capsule docking with three new astronauts while the previous crew and its Shenzhou capsule was still docked. The Tianzhou freighter had to undock to provide a port during this time period for the two manned capsules.

This formation free flight and docking was also likely testing the kind of routine maneuvers China plans to do when it launches its Hubble-class optical space telescope next year. That telescope will fly freely near the station during most of its operations. For maintenance and repair however it is my understanding that it will be brought back to the station and docked with it. The just completed independent flight of the Tianzhou freighter demonstrated this capability.

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Russia to launch Luna-25 on August 11, 2023

9:23 am


Click for interactive map.

According to reports in Russia’s state run press, the new launch date for its Luna-25 lander to the Moon has now been scheduled for August 11, 2023.

The launch of an automatic space probe to the Moon, the Luna-25, is scheduled for August 11 this year, the tour operator RocketTrip has said on its website. “August 11 is the launch date,” the website says in the section devoted to the tour to the Vostochny spaceport for the launch of the Luna-25.

The launch had been scheduled for July. The one month delay was announced last week, with no explanation.

The map shows landing locations of three landers that are all scheduled for launch in the next four months. All are targeting spots near the Moon’s south pole (the white cross).

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Pushback: Court victory for volleyball student and coach father who were blacklisted for disagreeing with queer agenda

1:43 pm

Blake Allen, punished for being a normal high school girl
Blake Allen, punished for being a normal high school girl

Bring a gun to a knife fight: After an eighteen-month court battle, school officials in Vermont on June 1st conceded defeat, settling the lawsuit [pdf] with a high school student and her father who the school had suspended for having the nerve to write publicly about the school’s sexual policies that allowed boys to leer at girls in the girl’s dressing rooms.

The school district will pay the father and daughter $125,000 and the suspensions will be removed from their records, according to the White River Valley Herald.

The background, which I have reported on several times previously: In the fall of 2022 high school student Blake Allen was suspended by her Vermont high school for daring to write an op-ed criticizing its policy allowing a cross-dressing boy to change in the girl’s lockeroom. School officials also suspended her father, Travis Allen, from his job as the high school’s volleyball coach for the crime of stating these facts on social media.
» Read more

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Barren land on Mars

12:38 pm

Barren land on Mars
Click for original image.

It might seem strange to call any particular place on Mars “barren” when the entire planet has no visible signs of life anywhere. However, much of the surface of Mars involves wind and ice features that show evidence of change and evolution over time. The presence of apparent near-surface ice and glacial features in almost every image located above 30 degrees latitude emphasizes this sense of potential life, even if that life will only be transported from Earth and established there someday by humans.

Today’s cool image to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, has none of these features. It is dry barren bedrock, with only a faint scattering of Martian dust indicated by many faint dust devil tracks.

The picture was taken on March 13, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The largest and most distinct flat-topped mesa in the image is only about 100 feet high, with the north-south ridgeline to the south about 20 feet high.
» Read more

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Researchers successfully transmit electricity from space

10:22 am

In a test of a system to wirelessly transmit electricity from solar power stations in orbit, researchers from Caltech have succeeded in transmitting a small amount of electricity from an orbiting cubesat launched in January.

“Through the experiments we have run so far, we received confirmation that MAPLE can transmit power successfully to receivers in space,” [professor Ali] Hajimiri says. “We have also been able to program the array to direct its energy toward Earth, which we detected here at Caltech. We had, of course, tested it on Earth, but now we know that it can survive the trip to space and operate there.”

This small scale test mainly proved the technology can survive launch, operate in space, and transmit power back to Earth. Whether the rate of transmission can be profitable remains as yet unknown. Nor is it yet known the effects such energy transmissions through the atmosphere will have.

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Astronomers think they have completed the census of Near Earth asteroids

10:14 am

Astronomers in a new paper [pdf] have concluded that the census of Near Earth asteroids is largely now complete, and have begun focusing their effort on narrowing down the list of potentially dangerous asteroids in that census. From the press release:

Researchers from CU Boulder and NASA have completed a census of hundreds of large asteroids orbiting near Earth—gauging which ones could come precariously close to our planet over the next thousand years. The researchers identified at least 20 asteroids that scientists may want to study more to make certain they pose no threat to life on Earth in the next millennium.

To be clear, the researchers say the odds of any of these rocky bodies striking the planet are extremely low, and are next to zero for the coming century. But because the fallout from such an impact would be catastrophic, it’s important to be sure, said Oscar Fuentes-Muñoz, lead author of the study. “We don’t want to alarm people, because the results are not alarming,” said Fuentes-Muñoz, a doctoral student in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences. “But there are a lot of uncertainties in predicting so far into the future.”

To sum up, none of those 20 asteroids has any chance of hitting the Earth in the next few hundred years. Beyond that the uncertainties make it difficult to predict. Reducing those uncertainities is now the focus of their work.

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German rocket startup successfully completes full duration engine test of upper stage

10:03 am

The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg on June 2, 2023 successfully completed a full duration engine test of the upper stage of its rocket.

Launch service provider Rocket Factory Augsburg AG (RFA) has successfully hot fired its upper stage for a full duration of 280 seconds. This marks the successful completion of the Integrated System Test (IST) campaign, in which a staged-combustion Helix engine was integrated into an upper stage tank system and hot fired several times up to full duration in the final test. This is the 1st time in Europe that a privately developed staged combustion upper stage has been successfully hot fired.

The company will also use the Helix engine in its first stage, so this test essentially proved its capability for that use as well. With this success, the company will now start constructing the first stage, with the first launch of the entire rocket targeting the end of this year.

Two important tidbits about this story. First, the test was done at a private testing facility in Germany. In the past all such testing was done under the control of the the European Space Agency, at its sites. Germany has essentially now broken that monopoly in its push to develop its own independent rocket industry of competing private companies.

Second, the launch is presently aiming to take off from a launchpad the company has leased and is building at the new Shetland Island spaceport in the United Kingdom. I wonder if it will have the same regulatory problems as Virgin Orbit in getting its launch permit. If so, that launch won’t happen this year.

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Three astronauts return to Earth safely from China’s Tiangong-3 space station

9:49 am

After completing six months in space on China7s Tiangong-3 space station, three astronauts safely returned to Earth yesterday, with their Shenzhou capsule touching down in inner Mongolia.

This mission was the first full six month mission on the station. During their mission they completed four spacewalks. Though little was published about what was accomplished on those EVAs, it is likely it involved completing the construction of the station as well as installing some exterior experiments.

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Russian communications satellite in trouble

9:41 am

A ten-year old Russian Ekspress geosynchronous communications satellite in early June developed problems that have forced engineers to shut down much of its capabilities.

The problem was similar to issues experienced in 2020 on a second similar Ekspress orbiting geosynchronous communications satellite, suggesting both satellites had the same design flaw.

For Russia the problem is made much more serious because its invasion of the Ukraine has made it impossible to replace this satellite.

The latest impact on Russian satellite communications capacity came at a time when the established production model for the Ekspress satellite family, relying on Western suppliers, had been disrupted by the Kremlin’s escalation of the war against Ukraine in 2022, likely resulting in severe delays if not a complete stop in the development of this type of spacecraft in Russia.

In other words, Russia has lost significant communications capacity, and does not have a way to replace that capacity because of the sanctions against it imposed because of its invasion. Once again, Putin’s idiotic war in the Ukraine has caused nothing but disaster for Russia.

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SpaceX successfully launches cargo Dragon to ISS

9:25 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX this morning successfully launched another cargo Dragon freighter to ISS, lifting off on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.

This cargo capsule is on its fourth flight. The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The capsule carries about 7, 000 pounds of supplies, including another set of new solar arrays for ISS, and will dock with ISS tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

38 SpaceX
20 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 43 to 20 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 43 to 36. SpaceX by itself leads the world 38 to 36, but when you add other American companies it still trails everyone else combined 38 to 42.

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SpaceX launches 22 2nd generation Starlink satellites

6:19 pm

SpaceX this morning successfully launched another 22 2nd generation Starlink satellites into orbit, with its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral at 8:20 am (Eastern).

The first stage completed its third flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The two fairing halves completed their sixth and ninth times respectively.

The company had hoped to follow this launch with a second from Cape Canaveral only hours later, sending a new Dragon cargo freighter to ISS, but that launch was scrubbed due to weather concerns later in the day. It has been rescheduled for tomorrow.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

37 SpaceX
20 China
8 Russia
5 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads China 42 to 20 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 42 to 36. SpaceX by itself leads the world 37 to 36, but when you add other American companies it trails everyone else combined 37 to 42.

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Avalanche to the east of Gale Crater on Mars

1:38 pm

Landslide on Mars
Click for original picture.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 19, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an avalanche that slumped downward out of the material that forms the interior western wall of an unnamed 25-mile-wide crater about 100 miles east of Gale Crater, where Curiosity has been roving for more than a decade.

The scientists call these types of Martian avalanches “mass-wasting events”, since the entire mass of the cliff moves downhill in a chunk, rather than as a pile of rocks that grows in size and strength as it picks up material on its way down.

It is not clear how old this slide is. A lot of the material on this slope appears to be Martian dust, some of which has flowed into the avalanche material after it had slide downhill.
» Read more

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Shadowcam on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter sees no obvious ice in the permanently shadowed interior of Spudis crater

10:30 am

Overview map

Using Shadowcam, a camera built by Arizona State University that is on South Korea’s Danuri lunar orbiter and is designed to see into very dark regions of little light, scientists have obtained optical images showing the permanently shadowed interior of Spudis Crater, located only about ten miles from the Moon’s south pole.

That picture is below. To the left is an annotated overview created from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) high resolution images. The white box inside Spudis Crater indicates the area covered by the section of the Shadowcam image I have focused on. The red outlines indicate areas that are thought to be permanently shadowed. The relatively flat ridgeline between Shackleton and Spudis is one of the prime future landing sites for NASA’s Artemis program.
» Read more

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Newly discovered Starliner issues delay launch again

9:24 am

NASA and Boeing revealed today that two newly discovered design issues involving Starliner’s parachutes and the tape used to protect the capsule’s wiring has forced it to cancel the planned June launch, with no firm new launch date scheduled.

The parachute issue involves the parachute cords, specifically the “soft link joints” that connect those lines to the capsule.

[Mark Nappi, Boeing’s Starliner VP] told reporters fabric links that join the parachutes to the lines of the spacecraft, called soft link joints, need to be replaced and possibly recertified to withstand heavier loads and stresses to ensure crew safety. “They were tested recently because of a discovery that we found during the review process where we believed that the data was recorded incorrectly,” Nappi said. “We tested (the soft links), and sure enough, they did fail at the lower limit.” [emphasis mine]

The tape — which has been found to be far more flammable than expected — is difficult to fix.

The second problem found last week is more extensive since the tape used to protect Starliner’s wiring harnesses from nicks or abrasions runs for hundreds of feet through several of the spacecraft’s internal systems. “There is a lot of tape on the wire harnesses,” Nappi said. “We’re looking at solutions that would provide for potentially another type of wrapping over the existing tape in the most vulnerable areas that reduces the risk of a fire hazard.”

That both of these issues were not fixed in development is beyond astonishing and speaks so badly of Boeing’s engineering and management that it is difficult to find words. In fact, for Boeing to use tape that could cause a fire now, more than a half century after the Apollo 1 capsule fire, suggests a level of incompetence that makes one wonder why anyone would ever fly on any of its spacecraft or airplanes. This is certainly not the company that built the 747.

Officials indicated that they might be able fix this issues fast enough that a fall launch could occur, but made no promises.

For Boeing, this new delay only worsens its bottom line. It built Starliner on a fixed-price contract, so every delay and issue must be paid for by it, not NASA. Meanwhile, the delays mean that SpaceX is getting flight contracts to ISS from NASA, contracts that Boeing would have gotten had Starliner been ready as planned. Worse, ISS is now looking at a 2028 retirement. If Boeing doesn’t get Starliner operational soon, there might not even be any contracts for it to win.

I have embedded the full press conference below for those who wish to watch NASA and Boeing officials blather about how they really haven’t done anything stupid here. Really, you have got to believe them!
» Read more

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Sunspot update: May activity once again far above prediction

5:06 pm

With the start of the month it is time once again for our monthly sunspot update, based on the new data that NOAA today added to its own monthly graph that tracks the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere. I have posted that graph below, but have added some extra details to provide some context.

In May the number of sunspots zipped upward again, ending up at the second highest monthly count during this ramp up to solar maximum, and the second highest count since the last solar maximum in 2014.
» Read more

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