Category: Behind The Black

China takes the global lead in fusion research

9:47 am

In setting new records of temperature and running time in its own tokamak fusion experiment, China now leads the U.S. in the field of developing the technology for generating practical fusion energy.

[The U.S.] ITER’s target temperature is 150 million °C (270 million °F). China’s EAST facility, which is a key contributor to the ITER project, has hit this mark already, reaching 160 million °C (288 million °F) for 20 seconds, and holding 120 million °C (216 million °F) for 101 seconds in separate experiments announced last May.

The latest experiment tested the Chinese tokamak’s capability to endure extreme temperatures over longer periods, sustaining a temperature 2.6 times hotter than the Sun’s core for some 1,056 seconds, or 17 minutes and 36 seconds. Nobody’s ever sustained a high-temperature plasma for 1,000 seconds before, so this is an important milestone.

The development of this capability continues China’s effort to lead the world in all areas of research, led I think by the many high government officials in positions of great power after cutting their teeth as managers for China’s space effort. These individuals understand how to build big technology projects at the cutting edge of science, and are likely pushing for more such research in all fields, such as the experiments in fusion energy above.

As big government projects, however, the long term future of such work is very risky. Government projects like this might start out great, which describes China’s status today, but they always end up corrupt and hidebound, as seen in the Soviet Union and at NASA in the U.S.

Nonetheless, this success highlights China’s aggressive effort to lead the world in all things. We would be foolish to ignore this.

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Starlink temporarily backs out of India due to regulatory snafu

9:38 am

Capitalism in space: Starlink in India has stopped taking new preorders and is refunding all previous preorders of its internet service because it had failed to get the proper regulatory permits for selling its service.

India’s Ministry of Communications issued a Nov. 26 statement instructing SpaceX to “refrain from booking/rendering” Starlink services “with immediate effect” because the company did not have a license to operate in the country.

In the days that followed, SpaceX appeared to be still accepting $99 preorder deposits via Starlink’s website for addresses in India.

But the website now tells prospective subscribers: “Starlink is not yet available in your area due to pending regulatory approval. As we receive approvals our coverage area will continue to expand, so please check back for future availability in your area.”

The head of Starlink India also announced his resignation today. It appears he not only did not get the proper permissions, he ignored that November 26 order from the government.

SpaceX apparently is now reviewing the legal situation, which is very unclear and might even block the company from selling its services in India entirely. No timeline is presently known for restarting its operations there.

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Julie Andrews – My Favorite Things

6:01 pm

An evening pause: From the movie The Sound of Music (1965), a song about teaching children to face fear, to push past it, and live boldly and with courage. And to do it with humor. As Ray Bradbury wrote in his book, Something Wicked This Way Comes, you defeat evil and fear by laughing at it. The world needs to recapture this idea, or else we are doomed.

Hat tip Tom Wilson.

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Webb: Sun shield deployment completed

3:32 pm

Engineers today successfully completed the full deployment of the sun shield of the James Webb Space Telescope.

The unfolding and tensioning of the sunshield involved 139 of Webb’s 178 release mechanisms, 70 hinge assemblies, eight deployment motors, roughly 400 pulleys, and 90 individual cables totaling roughly one quarter of a mile in length. The team also paused deployment operations for a day to work on optimizing Webb’s power systems and tensioning motors, to ensure Webb was in prime condition before beginning the major work of sunshield tensioning.

The process took eight days, and was by far the most complex such remote deployment ever attempted by an unmanned spacecraft. The shield is now in place to shade Webb from sunlight and heat and thus allow it to observe very faint infrared objects billions of light years away.

Next comes the deployment of Webb’s secondary mirror, followed by the unfolding of its main mirror.

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Ice canyons at the Martian north pole

1:46 pm

Ice canyons at the Martian north pole
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on July 24, 2021 by the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and shows one small portion of the edge of Mars’ north pole ice cap.

The many layers in that ice cap are clearly evident, with some darker because they were probably laid down at a time when the Martian atmosphere was more filled with volcanic ash. According to the presently accepted theory, the layers show the cyclical climate patterns of Mars, caused by the large shifts in its obliquity, or the tilt of the planet along its rotational axis, ranging from 11 to 60 degrees. Presently Mars is tilted 25 degrees, similar to Earth’s 23 degrees. The two extremes cause the planet’s water ice to shift back and forth from the mid-latitudes to the poles, causing the layers.

The height of this layered cliff face is probably about 1,500 feet, though that is a very rough estimate. Notice also that this image shows an ice canyon running from the left to the right and flowing into a much larger ice canyon to the right. The top cliff is probably about a third the height of the bottom cliff.

The overview map below shows gives the context, not only in place but also in time.
» Read more

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ArianeGroup ships the 1st Ariane-6 core and upper stages to French Guiana

10:08 am

Capitalism in space: ArianeGroup today announced that the first completed stages for its new Ariane-6 rocket have been shipped to French Guiana for testing.

The Ariane 6 core stage and upper stage intended for the combined tests on the launch pad in French Guiana have left the ArianeGroup sites in Les Mureaux and Bremen and begun their journey to Europe’s Spaceport. These stages will be integrated by ArianeGroup in the Launcher Assembly Building (BAL) to create the central core for the Ariane 6 combined tests model.

The press release provided no information on the schedule for the tests or the first launch. An earlier release had targeted the second quarter of ’22 for the inaugural launch, but based on today’s press release I would suspect that scheduled is very tentative.

This press release marks another major change in how Europe will launch rockets. No longer is the government-run Arianespace in charge. Instead, the commercial partnership of Airbus and Safran, dubbed ArianeGroup, is running things. In exchange for building this new rocket this partnership demanded a greater share of the profits and full control, something the European Space Agency (ESA) had denied them under Arianespace. This new arrangement was devised in the hope it would give this private partnership a direct interest in making a profit, thus cutting costs and encouraging innovation.

However, because ESA is still very very closely involved in every step, it is uncertain whether this arrangement will achieve its goals. Moreover, there are indications that ArianeGroup itself is somewhat risk adverse. For example, in designing Ariane-6 both decided to forego re-usability. Their rocket is thus more expensive than SpaceX, and has had trouble garnering launch contracts.

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Webb deployment resumes, with continuing success

9:50 am

After a day delay to assess the telescope’s earlier operation in space, engineers yesterday resumed the deployment of the James Webb Space Telescope’s sun shield.

First they began tensioning the shield’s first of five layers, completing that operation in about five and a half hours.

Next the engineers proceeded to tighten layers two and three, completing that task in about three hours.

Today they have begun tightening the last two layers. A live stream of this slow and relatively unexciting process (as long as nothing goes wrong) is available from NASA here.

Based on what has been done so far, it appears that the deployment of the sun shield, considered the most challenging part of Webb’s deployment, is going to complete successfully. While the unfolding and deployment of the mirror still must be done, getting the sun shield deployed eliminates one of the great concerns that has kept both astronomers and engineers awake nights for decades.

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South Korea pinpoints cause of October launch failure

9:39 am

The new colonial movement: South Korea’s space agency KARI has completed its investigation of the launch failure in October of its first entirely home-built Nuri rocket, revealing that the support structures for the rocket’s helium tanks were designed incorrectly, and allowed the tanks to break free during launch.

“The support structures holding helium tanks inside the third-stage oxidizer tank were not properly designed to account for a force referred to as buoyancy,” KARI said in a Dec. 29 statement. Buoyancy, the upward force exerted by a fluid that pushes an object, rises along with a rocket’s altitude, which was not accounted for, according to KARI.

The helium tanks with the faulty anchors were inside the upper stage’s oxidizer tank, which was filled with liquid oxygen needed for the rocket’s ignition. With the helium tanks coming loose, they disrupted pipelines within the oxidizer tank and led the liquid oxygen to leak, resulting in early termination of the ignition, KARI explained.

The helium is used to keep the tank pressurized as it uses up its oxygen so that oxygen will continue to flow to the engine. Thus, they sit inside the oxygen tanks, and when they came loose they damaged its internal pipes.

Though they can fix the problem, it will likely cause a delay in the second Nuri launch attempt, presently scheduled for May.

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Update on Starship/Superheavy development

9:30 am

Link here.

The article first provides a detailed review of the past year’s effort, which leads to laying out the possibilities for 2022. Key quote:

With the FAA citing its plans to issue the Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment (PEA) for the SpaceX Starship / Super Heavy project no earlier than the end of February, SpaceX can claim the review process is the schedule driver. However, [Superheavy] Booster 4 [intended for Starship’s first orbital flight] has yet to conduct a Static Fire test, likely including an eventual full 29 engine firing. Further evolutions of the Ship and Booster are yet to come online, with a plan to go to nine engines on Ship and 33 engines on the Booster, all moving to the Raptor 2 variant.

In other words, there is a lot of work that needs to be done before SpaceX can actually fly that first orbital flight of Starship/Superheavy, and that even if the FAA rubberstamped the approval of its environmental reassessment of the Boca Chica site today, SpaceX would likely not be able to launch that orbital flight for several months anyway.

The article also suggests that SpaceX has made big progress in rethinking the Raptor manufacturing process, and has aimed those changes for the production of the Raptor-2 engine, which will also be about 20% more powerful than the Raptor engines presently being installed.

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2021: The year that private enterprise took over rocketry

2:50 pm

The year that just ended, 2021, was for the field of rocketry the most successful year since the launch of Sputnik in 1957. In a year when the world was still racked by COVID panic and its oppressive restrictions on both private and public life, the global launch industry was able to rack up the most launches ever, successfully completing 134 launches and topping the previous best year, 1975, by one.

The chart below shows all successful launches by every nation in the 21st century. It also shows in the U.S. the breakdown of those launches by private companies.
» Read more

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Sunspot update: The Sun blasts off!

10:16 am

Over the weekend NOAA posted its monthly update to its graph showing the long term trends in the Sun’s sunspot activity. As I do every month, I have posted that graph below, annotated to show the previous solar cycle predictions and thus provide context.

In December the Sun’s sunspot activity not only continued the pattern of the past two years — whereby sunspot activity has consistently exceeded the prediction of NOAA’s solar scientist panel — the amount of activity shot up like a rocket. December 2021 saw the most sunspots in a single month since September 2015, when the Sun was about a third of the way into its ramp down from the solar maximum in 2014.

» Read more

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A review of China’s space program

8:42 am

Link here. The article covers China’s achievements in ’21, then reviews the status of its rocket development program. The key quote to me however was this, describing the upcoming plans for the assembly of China’s space station:

In 2022, China is expected to launch two more crew rotations to the Tiangong station using its Shenzhou spacecraft. The first, Shenzhou 14, is expected in May, while the second one will launch in November. Both missions will launch aboard Chang Zheng [Long March] 2F/G rockets. Two more modules for the space station are also planned to launch in the course of the year.

These new modules are the laboratory cabin modules (LCMs). The first is named Wentian, meaning Quest for the Heavens, while the second is Mengtian, or Dreaming of the Heavens. Both will launch on Chang Zheng 5B rockets, with Wentian currently scheduled to lift off in May or June, with Mengtian planned to launch in August or September.

This means that — assuming China has not reworked the design of its Long March 5B rocket — a large out-of-control core stage will be crashing to Earth in the the spring and late summer.

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Biden administration commits to operating ISS through 2030

5:46 pm

The Biden administration yesterday announced that it has committed NASA to operating the International Space Station (ISS) through 2030, a six year extension to the previous end date of 2024.

Today’s abrupt announcement on a federal holiday comes one day after Biden and Putin had a “serious and substantive” telephone conversation about the situation in Ukraine where Russian troops are massed at the border. Biden has said that if Russia invades Ukraine the United States and its allies will respond with more economic sanctions. A Russian official told reporters later that Putin warned Biden that any such sanctions “could result in a ‘complete rupture’ of relations” between the two countries, according to the New York Times.

…Asked why the ISS extension was announced today and if it is related to the Biden-Putin call, a NASA spokesperson told SpacePolicyOnline.com only that it has “been in the works for months.”

A White House commitment to 2030 falls short of setting the date in law, but demonstrates U.S. intentions at least as long as Biden is President. Whether the other partners, especially Russia, agree will be interesting to watch. ESA’s Director General, Josef Aschbacher, welcomed the news, but it will be the 11 ESA members who participate in the program who make the decision.

The article gives a good overview of the political issues, and notes accurately that it will be very difficult to operate the station if Russia and the U.S. part ways and Russia leaves the partnership.

What the article did not mention is the fragile state of some of Russia’s modules. Both Roscosmos and NASA know that the Zvezda module, the second oldest on ISS, is showing very worrisome signs of aging, including many stress fractures that have caused small airleaks. The Russians themselves have admitted that the module is failing, and have added that because of this fact the Putin government has begun work on a new and independent Russian station.

It is unclear if ISS could function if Zvezda became unusable. At a minimum its capabilities will be reduced. At worst it might not be safe to occupy.

The Biden administration and NASA can extend ISS on paper as much as they want, but reality suggests that it will be a dangerous challenge to keep the station running until 2030. The real solution is to get as many private commercial American stations launched in the next few years, so that when Zvezda fails, there will be viable options to ISS.

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Iran finally admits rocket launch on December 30th was a failure

5:33 pm

One day after implying that the test launch of Iran’s Simorgh orbital rocket on December 30th was actually a suborbital flight and was a success, that same official admitted yesterday that this was not true, that the plan had been to put three satellites in orbit, and that the launch was a failure.

Ahmad Hosseini, an Iranian defense ministry spokesman, revealed that the rocket failed to put its three payloads into orbit after the rocket was unable to reach the required speed, according to the news agency.

“For a payload to enter orbit, it needs to reach speeds above 7,600 (meters per second). We reached 7,350,” he said in a documentary broadcast on state TV.

It was Hosseini who claimed the launch was a success the day earlier, implying that the low speed was because the flight was intended to be suborbital. Either he knows nothing about rocketry (very likely), or is merely a mouthpiece who was ordered to change his story when the first story was laughed out of the room (also very likely).

The article at the link focuses on France’s condemnation of the launch, claiming it was a ballistic missile.

France’s foreign ministry said the launch was in breach of UN Security Council resolutions, Reuters reported. “We call on Iran not to launch further ballistic missiles designed to be capable of carrying nuclear weapons, including space launchers,” the ministry said.

Simorgh however is not a ballistic missile. Everything I have read about it suggests it is designed to put payloads in orbit, not deliver bombs to other parts of the globe. A ballistic missile is technically a very different thing. It usually uses solid rockets which can be stored for long periods and launched at a moment’s notice. Simorgh uses hypergolic fuels which — though they can be used on ballistic missiles — are rarely used for that purpose because of their toxic nature.

At the same time, these facts about Simorgh should not make us think Iran is not a threat. If you can develop the manpower and technical know-how to built an orbital rocket, you will also have increased your ability to build missiles. Iran is without doubt working to develop both.

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The unfurling of Webb’s sun shield begins

5:18 pm

Engineers have begun the multi-day unfurling and deployment of the sun shield on the James Webb Space Telescope.

The first step is to deploy two booms on each side of the telescope that draw the shield itself outward.

The deployment of the first boom was held up several hours to give engineers time to make sure the protective covers had, in fact, rolled off to the side of the sunshade pallets as required.

“Switches that should have indicated that the cover rolled up did not trigger when they were supposed to,” NASA said in a blog post. “However, secondary and tertiary sources offered confirmation that it had.”

“The deployment of the five telescoping segments of the motor-driven mid-boom began around 1:30 p.m., and the arm extended smoothly until it reached full deployment,” NASA said.

Engineers then sent commands to deploy the second sunshade boom, which extended smoothly and locked in place at 10:13 p.m., finally giving Webb its iconic kite-like shape.

Next the shield has to be tightened in place, which will also separate and tighten in place the shield’s five layers. According to the schedule, the four layers will be tensioned today, with the fifth tomorrow.

The step-by-step deployment is outlined in detail here, and updates to the most recently completed step after it is finished.

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Thank you to all my readers and supporters and a Happy New Year!

1:17 pm

As a truly miserable 2021 comes to an end, I want to send a very big and hearty thank you to all my readers and the many people who support my work here. I could not do this daily if I did not know that others were interested in what I did.

I also wish that 2022 be a great year for everyone. May we all see joy and happiness in our personal lives, and a renewal of freedom and the pursuit of happiness for everyone else in the coming year. The two go together.

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A small victory in Nevada against COVID mandates illustrates the ongoing corrupt politicizing of all of American culture

12:31 pm

Might still exist in Nevada
Might still exist in Nevada.

First the good news: An elected Nevada legislative commission last week overturned an extension proposed by the state’s board of health of its mandate that all college students in the state get COVID shots or be banned from school.

Initially approved in August by the Nevada State Board of Health, the emergency provision was set to last only 120-days, according to The Nevada Independent. When the mandate expired last week and was sent to the Legislative Commission for review, the Commission chose not to make it permanent, with all six Republican lawmakers voting against the mandate and all six Democrats for it.

The tie means the mandate is not renewed.

This small victory for freedom and against irrational discrimination and blacklists illustrates some fundamental points about the entire COVID madness as well as America’s evolving culture.
» Read more

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Wall Street financial firm condemns Astra as bad investment

10:02 am

Capitalism in space: In a blunt critique announcing its decision to short sell Astra stocks, the Wall Street financial firm Kerrisdale Capital condemned the startup rocket company as a poor investment.

Kerrisdale’s analysis focuses on two issues, Astra’s under-powered rocket and the company’s prediction that it will launch as many as 300 rockets a year by 2025.

Astra’s rocket launch projections are nonsense. No market analysis supports Astra’s planned 300+ launches by 2025. Excluding satellites from SpaceX and China from industry-wide forecasts, there is insufficient demand to support even a fraction of Astra’s aggressive forecast.

Large launch vehicles are a more efficient and cost-effective solution to deploying whole orbital planes versus piecemealing coverage through a series of small launches and will dominate the market for mega-constellations (which are widely expected to comprise the bulk of all satellites deployed over the next decade). Only scraps will remain for Astra and all the other smaller launchers—far less than Astra needs to turn a profit.

Astra is falling behind its competitors. Multiple industry executives we interviewed, who routinely secure launch services for small satellite manufacturers on a global basis, agree that Astra’s rocket dimensions and payload capacity are well below the “sweet spot” of customer needs.

The publication of this report caused an immediate 10% drop in Astra’s stock, though it then recovered somewhat.

The report has some validity, though it assumes that the market for rocket launches will remain the same as it has for decades, an assumption that is simply false. Things always change. What happened before is no guarantee it will happen that way in the future.

Moreover Astra’s strategy is to built a small rocket that is very very cheap. It hopes that low price will bring it cubesat customers who want a launch on schedule and sent to their chosen orbit, something they do not get when they are secondary payloads on larger rockets. There is a strong possibility that this strategy will work, based on the fast growth in the satellite industry in the past decade when SpaceX and Rocket Lab forced launch costs to drop from $100 to $500 million to $6 to $60 million.

Kerrisdale’s report however is a valid wake-up call, and suggests that Wall Street’s recent passion to pour money into many new startup rocket companies (estimated by some to exceed a hundred) might finally be easing.

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SpaceX raises another $337 million in investment capital

9:45 am

Capitalism in space: In an SEC filing yesterday SpaceX revealed that it has raised another $337 million in investment capital.

The company raised in 2021 a total of $1.85 billion, and over the last six years has raised close to $7 billion total. While some of that capital is being used to finance its Starlink internet constellation of satellites, most is being funneled into the development of its totally reusable heavy lift Starship/Superheavy rocket.

The eagerness of investors to put money behind SpaceX is a strong vote of confidence in the company, coming from totally independent sources.

Adding in the $2.9 billion dollar contract from NASA for building a lunar lander version of Starship, SpaceX has raised about $10 billion total for building this rocket.

Whether that will be enough of course is not yet known. Based on SpaceX’s past work it should be. That however assumes the federal government’s bureaucracy doesn’t throw a serious wrench in the process, something it right now appears to be doing by stalling the orbital test flight of Starship/Superheavy.

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1st stage of Webb sun shield deployment completed

9:29 am

The deployment of the forward and aft pallets required to support the sun shield for the James Webb Space Telescope has apparently been successfully completed.

The link takes you to the website that outlines each step in Webb’s entire 30-day deployment sequence, and is updated to show you the next required step as the process continues. Though I have yet to see any official announcement, this page now shows that both pallets have successfully unfolded and that the next step is removal of the covers that have protected the sun shield membrene during assembly and launch.

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Firefly forced to postpone next launch because of security issues

3:35 pm

Capitalism in space: Firefly has been forced to postpone its next launch of its Alpha rocket, tentative scheduled for late January, because the federal government wants the Ukranian investor — who essentially saved the company when it went bankrupt — to completely divest himself of any ownership.

Noosphere Venture Partners, a fund run by Ukrainian-born investor Max Polyakov, said Dec. 29 that it will retain an investment banking firm to sell its interest in Firefly. That sale comes at the request of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), the company said.

Polyakov invested $200 million to bring the company from the ashes when it was about to be liquidated in bankruptcy proceedings. He left its board of directors last year and reduced his share in the company last year in an effort to ease these same concerns. Apparently that wasn’t good enough, even though his ownership was not a problem when the company obtained a lease for a launch site at Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Though there might be a real security issue, we must not dismiss the possibility that this is a corrupt power play by people in Washington to use Polyakov’s foreign roots to push him out so that they can replace him, now that the company is healthy and moving forward after Polyakov saved it.

I know this is a cynical suspicion, but based on the behavior of our Washington bureaucracy and legislators in the past decade, it is far from an unreasonable one.

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Iran launches orbital Simorph rocket, does not reach orbit

3:09 pm

According to Iran’s state run press, it successfully launched its orbital Simorgh rocket on a test suborbital flight today, carrying three payloads to an altitude of 292 miles.

Ahmad Hosseini, an Iranian defense ministry spokesman, said the satellite-bearing rocket named Simorgh, or “Phoenix,” had launched the three cargoes at an altitude of 292 miles (470 km) and at a speed of 7,350 meters (4,5 miles) per second. “The intended research objectives of this launch were achieved,” Hosseini said, in comments broadcast on state television.

“This was done as a preliminary launch … we will have an operational launch soon,” the spokesman added, without further clarifying whether the devices had successfully entered Earth’s orbit.

In 2020 Iran completed an orbital launch using a mobile launcher, which probably used a different solid rocket instead of Simorgh.

However, since Simorgh is intended as an orbital rocket and it did did not reach orbit this time strongly suggests the rocket failed. Since the Iranian press provided images of the rocket in flight soon after launch, the failure possibly occurred at first stage separation followed by ignition of the second stage, a critical moment in a launch where failures often occur.

No matter. Whether it failed or functioned exactly as planned, this launch will provide Iranian engineers valuable information for that inevitable successful orbital flight.

As an orbital rocket designed to launch satellites, Simorgh actually poses less of a threat than that mobile launcher from 2020. Simorgh isn’t really a missile designed to launch bombs. It takes too long to fuel, and its launch site is vulnerable. The mobile launcher used in 2020, likely using solid rockets, is far more dangerous.

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December 30, 2021 Zimmerman/Pratt on Texas podcast

1:24 pm

Last week I recorded a long interview with Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas discussing some of the recent blacklist and pushback stories I have posted on Behind the Black. That interview is now available in two parts here.

The most interesting part of the interview for me was when Robert and I discussed the mental strain and stress we both felt writing or discussing these stories every day. Both of us are optimists, and these stories of oppression are depressing, to put it mildly. After awhile you just want to ignore them and deal with something more uplifting.

We don’t however, because we both know that if we ignore this stuff it will only make it more difficult in the coming years to find anything uplifting to write or talk about. Freedom and human creativity is under aggressive attack, and as civilized human beings it is our obligation to report that story, so that all civilized humans will have the knowledge to successful fight back.

Give it a listen and comment below. We face a real civil war in the coming years, and the thoughts of my readers would be appreciated.

And if you are in Texas and can support Robert Pratt’s advertisers, please due so. He was blacklisted himself in January, and this podcast is his way of fighting back.

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The badlands on the floor of Valles Marineris

1:03 pm

The badlands on the floor of Valles Marineris
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The recent discovery that there might be a near surface reservoir of ice on the floor the canyon Valles Marineris, near the Martian equator, immediately brought this location to the forefront as a possible site for establishing colonies. The weather will be less harsh than higher latitudes, the low elevation means a thicker atmosphere, and the terrain will be more appealing than the boring flat northern lowlands.

The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, illustrates however the likely difficulties of landing and living on the floor of Valles Marineris. Taken on July 26, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), the photo shows just one small area of the floor of Ius Chasm, the western part of Valles Marineris and about 300 miles to the east of that water reserve.

In this one picture we can see trapped sand dunes in hollows, eroded depressions, mottled terrain resembling stucco, and innumerable cliffs and sinks and plateaus. For the first manned spacecraft to land on Mars, this is not a good first choice. Even later, when the first bases have been built, this terrain would still be forbidding for the early colonists to land in and traverse.

The overview map below shows exactly where this picture is relative to the rest of the Valles Marineris.
» Read more

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Pushback: Citizens create open Christmas soup kitchen when official food drive bans unjabbed

11:59 am

Spokane: Where some charities think some of the poor should starve during Christmas
Spokane: Where some charities think some of the poor should starve
during Christmas, while others step up to provide charity for all.

Pushback against blacklists: When the official annual Christmas soup kitchen in Spokane announced that the homeless and poor would be banned if they didn’t get COVID shots or tested first, a group of local citizens quickly organized an open soup kitchen where no jabs or testing would be required.

The image to the right illustrates the rules for the two competing soup kitchens.

A week before Christmas, in Spokane, WA, the Christmas Bureau food assistance program turned away needy people who could not show proof of Covid-19 vaccination or proof of a negative COVID test no more than 72 hours old.

The Christmas Bureau is an annual holiday assistance program coordinated by Catholic Charities Eastern Washington, Volunteers of America, and the Spokesman-Review. The program is made possible by generous monetary funds and volunteer hours donated by community members and organizations.

In response to the Christmas Bureau’s actions, a group of Christian patriots launched a “No Vaccine Canteen” to feed everyone — regardless of their medical history. [emphasis mine]

I purposely highlight the entities who decided that it was all right to deny charity to some of the poor and homeless during the Christmas season, merely because they hadn’t gotten the government jab. To paraphrase the words of Scrooge, “Maybe these unvaccinated should simply die and decrease the surplus population.”

For those in Spokane with the Christmas season in their hearts, this information should provide guidance next year when these particular organizations come begging for money. It is clear they really don’t have charity in mind, but power and enforcing their will, even onto the most vulnerable.

Instead, Spokane citizens should contact the people who ran the “No-Vaccine Canteen,” who teamed up with an organization called Blessings Under The Bridge, and give them their donations. When they heard about the Christmas Bureau’s decision to turn people away, these people were quickly able to raise $3500 and organize multiple free meal events for the poor.

Below is a video interview with Dan Bell, who helped organize the “No-Vaccine Canteen.” As he says,
» Read more

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Finalists announced in the ’21 Illusion of the Year contest

9:59 am

The top ten finalists, including the first place winner, in the 2021 best optical illusion of the year contest have now been announced.

The annual illusion contest is run by the Neural Correlate Society, an organization devoted to promoting awareness of the science behind perception and cognition. For 17 years the annual contest has consistently delivered an assortment of compelling illusions, frequently underpinned by fascinating scientific principles.

This year’s winner, from UK scientist and magician Matt Pritchard, is a unique example of an anamorphic illusion. These are illusions that present a viewer with an image that appears distorted until it is looked at from a specific perspective.

I have embedded below a video showing Pritchard’s illusion, dubbed the Phantom Queen. If you go to the contest’s website you can see videos of all ten finalists, all of which are fun and quite remarkable in their ability to fool the eye.
» Read more

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