Category: Behind The Black

Hakuto-R sends first image back to Earth

9:04 am

Hakuto-R's first released images
Go here and here for original images.

The private Hakuto-R lunar lander, owned and built by the Japanese-based company Ispace, is operating as planned and has sent back its first images from two different cameras.

The larger image to the right was taken by a camera on one of Canada’s payloads. It shows the Earth two minutes after launch, with the rocket’s upper stage acting as a frame. The inset, reduced to insert here, was taken 19 hours after launch by the lander’s main camera, and shows the Earth at night. Both images demonstrate that the spacecraft is stable and functioning perfectly.

The goals of the mission remain mostly engineering. Its focus is demonstrating first that Ispace’s lander can do what it says so that future customers will be confident buying payload space. Similarly, the payloads, such as the UAE’s Rashid rover, are doing the same thing.

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Ariane 5 successfully launches three satellites

3:33 pm

Arianespace’s Ariane 5 rocket successfully launched two communications satellites plus a weather satellite today, leaving that rocket only two more launches left before it is permanently retired.

As this was only the fifth successful launch this year by Arianespace (representing Europe), the leader board in the 2022 launch race remains unchanged:

58 China
56 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 80 to 58 in the national rankings, but now trails the entire world combined 90 to 80.

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December 13, 2022 Quick space links

2:55 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • NASA begins testing of more SLS rocket engines

    • This story is certainly connected to the decision to buy more SLS’s from Boeing. The new rockets however won’t launch for years, so I suspect this testing is partly an effort to justify the high cost of SLS.

 

 

 

 

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The featureless volcanic ash plains of Mars

2:04 pm

The featureless volcanic ash plains of Mars

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 10, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be a relatively featureless plain with a surface resembling stucco.

At -9 degrees south latitude, this is in the Martian dry equatorial regions. No ice or glaciers here. However, the consistent orientation of the knobs and hills suggest dunes and sand blown by prevailing winds, and that guess holds some truth. This location is deep within the Medusae Fossae Formation, the largest volcanic ash deposit on Mars, covering an area about as big as India, and believed to be the source of most of the red planet’s dust.

We are thus looking at thick layer of ash, its surface shaped over eons by the winds of Mars’ thin atmosphere.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Archaeologists go underground to practice their research

11:44 am

What modern academia demands from teachers, researchers, and students
Mindless conforming robots: What today’s leftist academia demands

The modern dark age: In order to do their archaeological research free from the Marxist and bigotry tropes now required in academia — or else be blacklisted — many young archaeologists are now going underground, forming anonymous chat groups to discuss their work safe from blacklisting.

The essay at the link first outlines in detail the oppressive leftist culture that now makes honest and open scientific research difficult if not impossible among our intellectual class. Dare to say or write anything that even suggests some cultures are different or better than others and you will be ostracized so quickly you won’t know what happened to you.
» Read more

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Research: Those who get the jab are intolerant and eager to discriminate

9:21 am

According to a new peer-reviewed research paper in Nature that studied more than 15,000 people in 21 countries, those who chose to get COVID shots are strongly intolerant of those who have not, and express that intolerance with an eagerness to deny others their human rights.

The research found that vaccinated people express discriminatory attitudes towards individuals who are unvaccinated at levels as high as or higher than discriminatory attitudes directed towards other common targets of prejudice, such as immigrant populations or people who struggle with drug addiction. On the whole, this prejudice tends to be one-sided; only in the USA and Germany do the authors find that unvaccinated individuals feel some antipathy towards those who are vaccinated, although no statistical evidence of negative stereotyping or exclusionary attitudes towards these latter individuals were observed. Researchers also found evidence in support of discriminatory attitudes against the unvaccinated in all countries except Hungary and Romania and find that discriminatory attitudes are more strongly expressed in cultures with stronger cooperative norms.

You can read the paper here.

I can guess that the higher level of anger by the unjabbed to the jabbed in the U.S. is directly because the discrimination and intolerance imposed by the jabbed, such as Joe Biden’s shot mandates, violated what Americans consider their fundamental Constitutional rights. Who wouldn’t be hostile to someone who illegally cost you your job, your career, or even all your social contacts, because you didn’t want to get a COVID shot?

The study however is in general very depressing, because it tells us that the open-mindedness and toleration that was the hallmark of western civilization is largely gone. The future, built by the intolerant attitudes of today’s majority populations, will be a vicious and narrow-minded place.

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NASA approves $1.2 billion asteroid-hunting space telescope

8:51 am

NASA has given the go-ahead to build NEO-Surveyor for $1.2 billion, more than twice the cost of its original proposal, to launch by 2028 and then look for potentially dangerous asteroids.

Notably, NEO Surveyor was earlier estimated to cost between $500 million and $600 million, or around half of the new commitment. The NASA statement said that the cost and schedule commitments outlined align the mission with “program management best practices that account for potential technical risks and budgetary uncertainty beyond the development project’s control.” Earlier this year, the project’s launch was delayed two years, from 2026, due to agency budget concerns.

The mission is designed to discover 90% of potentially Earth-threatening asteroids and comets 460 feet (140 meters) or larger that come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of Earth’s orbit. The spacecraft will carry out the survey while from Earth-sun Lagrange Point 1, a gravitationally stable spot in space about 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) inside the Earth’s orbit around the sun.

A prediction: It will cost more, and not launch on time. NASA’s decision to double the budget and delay the launch two years suggests it did not trust the JPL cost and time estimates. Based on most NASA-centered projects, however, it is likely the new numbers will still be insufficient.

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Another space station company, ThinkOrbital, enters the competition

8:39 am

Though it failed to win a NASA contract to build its manned space station concept, the company ThinkOrbital has instead won small two research grants from the Space Force.

Earlier this year ThinkOrbital — with partners Redwire, KMI and Arizona State University — won two research contracts worth $260,000 under the U.S. Space Force Orbital Prime program for in-space servicing, assembly and manufacturing. Rosen said the plan is to refine the design concept for a space structure that could be used for debris removal and recycling.

“We’re working on a hub and spoke concept where smaller satellites would go out and gather the debris, bring it back to a central location, process it and we could either turn them into fuel or deorbit them,” said Rosen. “We could process debris at that hub, for example, and turn aluminum into aluminum powder that could be used for spacecraft fuel.”

ThinkOrbital is hoping to be selected for the next phase of Orbital Prime which could be worth up to $1.5 million.

This new concept would not be manned, but would instead be used by unmanned robots as service depot.

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Bezos and Blue Origin to star in animated kids show

8:30 am

If you can’t build anything, than draw it! Jeff Bezos and his space company Blue Origin are now set to star in a kids animated show called “Blue Origins Space Rangers”.

The children’s series will feature the voices of Bezos, who founded his space tourism business Blue Origin in 2000, as well as “Good Morning America” co-host Michael Strahan, who was a passenger in December 2021 on Blue Origin NS-19 on a 10-minute spaceflight. Bezos took his supersonic joy ride to space in July 2021.

Nor is this the only show that Blue Origin is part of. A feature film set to release in 2023 will feature Blue Origin’s proposed (but not yet built) Orbital Reef space station.

All of this is fun and good, but it once again raises a question of focus. Is Bezos and Blue Origin really focused on building rockets and space stations, or it is mostly a pr operation for Bezos to sell himself? The overall lack of progress on its real rockets and space stations suggests the latter.

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InSight still going, but barely

10:47 pm

InSight's daily power levels as of December 12, 2022

The InSight science team issued another update today, outlining the continuing low power levels produced by the Mars lander, barely enough to keep its seismometer, and nothing else, running.

As of Dec. 12, 2022, InSight is generating an average of ~285 watt-hours of energy per Martian day, or sol. The tau, or level of dust cover in the atmosphere, was estimated at .96 (typical tau levels outside of dust season range from 0.6-0.7).

I have added these numbers to the graph at right in order to show their context over time. Since the October dust storm the levels have held steady, even as the dust in the atmosphere has cleared somewhat.

Nonetheless, InSight’s future continues to be day-to-day. Should it fail to respond to two consecutive scheduled communications sessions, the team will declare it dead, and make no effort at recovery. Though they have been expecting this to happen since the end of October, the lander continues to hang on.

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December 12, 2022 Quick space links

3:27 pm

Courtesy of Jay, BtB’s stringer.

 

  • A look at Chinese pseudo-company Landspace

    • The review treats all these Chinese companies like private American companies, without recognizing that they do nothing without the approval and full supervision of the government.

 

 

 

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Strange terrain on the eastern floor of Gale Crater

1:10 pm

Strange terrain on the eastern floor of Gale Crater
Click for full image. For the inset, go here.

Though today’s cool image on the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, shows a small section on the floor of 96-mile-wide Gale Crater where Curiosity has been roving for the past decade, this picture looks at a different place. Curiosity landed in the northwest quadrant of the crater, and has been climbing the western slopes of Mount Sharp, which fills much of the crater’s interior. Today’s image looks at the crater’s floor on the east side of Mount Sharp.

The picture was taken on September 30, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The dark areas are likely dune seas, while the golden section near the top of the color strip is likely dust, though that is not certain. (This bright yellow is unusual for this particular color filter.) The greenish color suggests coarser materials, such as larger boulders and rocks, though this is also not certain.

The inset zooms into some unusual polygon lines that cut across the dunes and cratered terrain. Such lines suggest that once, in the far past, the ground here was wet. When it dried out (being now in the very dry equatorial regions of Mars) it formed these cracks, similar in nature to the polygon cracks one sees in drying mud on Earth. Since the data from Curiosity when it was on the crater floor also suggests a lake once existed inside the crater, these cracks add weight to that conclusion.

The overview map below places Gale Crater in the larger context of Mars.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Judge orders Philadelphia to stop blacklisting Christopher Columbus

12:48 pm

What Philadelphia thinks of Columbus
How Philadelphia wants Christopher Columbus honored

The modern dark age: A state judge has now ordered the city of Philadelphia to remove the plywood box that has covered its statue of Christopher Columbus for the past two years.

In her ruling, Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt said that if the city disagrees with the “message” the statue sends, it can add its own plaque with what it wants to convey. “More to the point, the City accepted the donation of the Columbus statue in 1876. It has a fiduciary duty to preserve that statue, which it designated an historic object in 2017. The Columbus statue is not City property as is, for example, a City snowblower,” the judge wrote.

On orders by the city’s Democratic Party mayor, Jim Kenny, the statue had been covered during the worst of the riots in 2020, with Kenny’s stated intention to remove it entirely at some point.
» Read more

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NOAA once again over-predicts the hurricane count

12:22 pm

As it has done repeatedly in recent years, NOAA in 2022 once again over-predicted the hurricane count for this past hurricane season, predicting an above-normal season when it actually ended up to be well below-normal.

In late May and again in early August 2022 NOAA predicted that the year 2022 Atlantic Hurricane Season (between June to end November calendar period) would be an “above normal” season with 14-21 named storms, between 6-10 hurricanes including 3-6 major hurricanes (Category 3,4 and 5) as shown in NOAA’s diagram below.

Colorado State University’s Department of Atmospheric Science/Tropical Meteorology Project has compiled the year 2022 tropical storm data, establishing that, compared to its 30 year North Atlantic data records covering the Climatological period 1991-2020, the year 2022 hurricane season was below average in Named Storms, Named Storm Days, Hurricane Days, Major Hurricanes, Major Hurricane Days and Accumulated Cyclone Energy (ACE).

The many graphs at the link also demonstrate that the predictions that there will be an increase in extreme weather events due to increased use of fossil fuels is also proving false.

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New bill imposes new and odious regulation on private space stations and satellites

11:35 am

Congress and the FCC to private space: Nice business you got here.
Congress and the FCC to private space: “Nice business you
got here. Shame if something happened to it.”

On December 8, 2022, two bills, sponsored by both a Democrat and a Republican, were introduced in the House to give the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) the power to regulate and even block the launch of commercial private space stations, while also giving that agency the power to require companies to meet its arbitrary regulations on de-orbiting defunct satellites and stations.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.) and the ranking member, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), said their legislation is needed to modernize the FCC for the rapidly changing space industry. Their two bills — the Satellite and Telecommunications Streamlining Act and Secure Space Act — seek to update regulations covering foreign ownership, space sustainability, license processing timelines, and satellite spectrum sharing.

The key language in the first bill [pdf] is this:
» Read more

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A wall of smoke, as seen by Hubble

9:57 am

A wall of smoke, as seen by Hubble
Click for full image.

Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have produced a magnificent image of an interstellar cloud, cropped and reduced to post here. From the caption:

A portion of the open cluster NGC 6530 appears as a roiling wall of smoke studded with stars in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. NGC 6530 is a collection of several thousand stars lying around 4350 light-years from Earth in the constellation Sagittarius. The cluster is set within the larger Lagoon Nebula, a gigantic interstellar cloud of gas and dust. It is the nebula that gives this image its distinctly smokey appearance; clouds of interstellar gas and dust stretch from one side of this image to the other.

Astronomers investigated NGC 6530 using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. They scoured the region in the hope of finding new examples of proplyds, a particular class of illuminated protoplanetary discs surrounding newborn stars. The vast majority of proplyds have been found in only one region, the nearby Orion Nebula. This makes understanding their origin and lifetimes in other astronomical environments challenging.

The first proplyds were seen in the very first images taken by Hubble after it was fixed and could finally take sharp pictures. That so few have been seen since is thus somewhat surprising.

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Remembering Apollo 17, fifty years after the last manned mission to the Moon

9:37 am

LRO oblique view of Apollo 17 landing site
Click for full image.

Link here.

The article comes from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, and includes a number of LRO photos of the landing site, including the oblique annotated image to the right, reduced to post here. As the article notes:

The Apollo 17 crew was the last of an era in human space exploration and the last to set foot on the Moon. Fifty years later, the landing sites, hardware, and footsteps remain delicately preserved on the lunar surface. Join the LRO team as we commemorate their inspiring achievements with additional images, research, maps, interactive sites, and a dedicated video. LRO continues to image the Apollo sites whenever possible, under multiple lighting conditions, and combine these images into interactive sites, like the Apollo 17 Temporal Traverse. The Lunar QuickMap 3D tool can be used to preview the Apollo landing sites and search for LROC images of the areas. For downloadable maps of the Taurus-Littrow Valley, visit the Map Sheets section on our downloads page here. Finally, the Apollo 17 fiftieth anniversary video below presents highlights of the mission with landing site views reconstructed using LROC images and topography.

I have embedded that video below. It does a marvelous job summarizing this mission, which in many ways remains the most daring human exploration mission since Columbus dared cross an ocean in a tiny ship only slightly larger than many lifeboats.
» Read more

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Update on the ten cubesats launched by SLS

9:16 am

Link here.

At this moment six of the ten cubesats either accomplished their mission successfully or are still operating, while four cubesats failed entirely.

Of those still working, two will go into lunar orbit and try to find evidence of both hydrogen and ice on the Moon. A third is testing “solid iodine” thrusters, while a fourth will observe how yeast samples react to a long exposure in deep space. A fifth cubesat is a joint NASA-JAXA mission, and is testing how to fly a smallsat in the low gravity of a Lagrangian point.

Finally, an Italian cubesat was used to successfully take images of the Moon and Orion, and has completed its mission.

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China’s Long March 4C rocket launches two satellites

9:05 am

Long March 4C launch

China today launched two experimental technology satellites, using its Long March 4C rocket from an interior spaceport.

The launch pictures, as captured on the right, show what appear to be panels falling off the rocket as it lifts off. Note how some of these falling panels are red, while the Chinese flag at the top of the rocket appears to be partly broken off in the later picture. The fairing and shell of the upper stage in the second picture also appear changed.

The Chinese state-run press claims the satellites reached orbit as planned, but these pictures suggest otherwise. If part of the fairing and outside of the upper stage fell off, there is a good chance the payload was damaged during max-q, the period soon after launch when rockets undergo the greatest stress in the Earth’s thicker atmosphere.

UPDATE from stringer Jay: Video of the launch. The panels continue to drop off for a considerable time.

Assuming this launch was a success, however, the 2022 launch race continues to heat up, with China vying to beat SpaceX after trailing the American company for most of the year.

58 China
56 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 80 to 58 in the national rankings, but trails the entire world combined 88 to 80.

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Orion successfully splashes down in the Pacific

8:42 pm

NASA’s Orion capsule today successfully returned from a three week trip around the Moon, splashing down in the Pacific where it was successfully recovered.

The next Artemis flight will be a manned one, using SLS and Orion to fly around the Moon. It will also be the first time Orion will use its full environmental system, with humans on board. Though presently scheduled for May 2024, it is almost certainly not going to fly before 2025.

The actual Artemis manned lunar landing will follow, no sooner than two years after that. As presently designed, that mission requires the establishment of the Lunar Gateway station — astronauts can be transferred from Orion to Starship and back again, and that station is likely not going to be ready in this time frame.

As I said yesterday, I predict the two already purchased private Starship missions around the Moon, paid for by Yusaku Maezawa and Jared Isaacman, will happen first. Both will certainly beat NASA’s planned landing on the Moon. I also expect both to beat that Orion manned fly-around in ’24-’25. And each will cost pennies compared to the entire SLS/Orion program, while actually making a profit that will be used to further development and more manned private flights.

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SpaceX successfully launches Ispace’s Hakuto-R private mission to Moon

12:51 am

Lunar map showing Hakuto-R's landing spot
Hakuto-R’s planned landing site is in Atlas Crater.

Using its Falcon 9 rocket, SpaceX tonight successfully launched Ispace’s Hakuto-R lunar lander, the first private mission attempting to softly land on the Moon.

The Falcon 9 first stage completed its fifth flight, landing successfully at Cape Canaveral.

Hakuto-R, which is actually the first of two missions, carries seven payloads, including two small rovers, Rashid, which is the United Arab Emirates first lunar mission, and a smaller rover built by Ispace. Both will operate for about a week, one lunar day. Hakuto-R will land on the Moon in April, 2023.

A second payload is a cubesat from JPL, called Lunar Flashlight. It will go into lunar orbit, testing new fuel technologies while also attempting to identify water in the permanently shadowed craters at the lunar south pole.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

57 China
56 SpaceX
21 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA

The U.S. now leads China 80 to 57 in the national rankings, but trails the entire world combined 87 to 80.

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NASA extends Boeing’s contract to produce more SLS rockets

10:30 am

NASA yesterday announced that it will pay Boeing $3.2 billion for two more SLS rockets.

NASA has finalized its contract with Boeing of Huntsville, Alabama, for approximately $3.2 billion to continue manufacturing core and upper stages for future Space Launch System (SLS) rockets for Artemis missions to the Moon and beyond.

Under the SLS Stages Production and Evolution Contract action, Boeing will produce SLS core stages for Artemis III and IV, procure critical and long-lead material for the core stages for Artemis V and VI, provide the exploration upper stages (EUS) for Artemis V and VI, as well as tooling and related support and engineering services.

All this really means is that NASA is going depend on SLS and Orion to fly its astronauts to and from the Moon, and because of that its pace of flight will be — at best — slow and long-drawn out. For example, this new order extends the contract out to 2028. It will thus leave plenty of time for SpaceX and other nations to get there first.

I predict that the private Starship missions paid for by Yusaku Maezawa and Jared Isaacman will both fly before these two new Artemis missions. You heard it here first.

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Chinese upper stage disintegrates in orbit

10:21 am

A Chinese Long March 6 upper stage, launched in on November 11, 2022, has disintegrated into more than 350 in orbit and now pose a threat to other orbiting spacecraft.

The Long March 6A rocket launched from Taiyuan, north China, on Nov. 11, successfully inserting the Yunhai 3 environmental monitoring satellite into its intended orbit.

The upper stage of the rocket, however, apparently suffered a breakup event shortly thereafter. On Nov. 12, the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron (18SDS) reported that it was tracking at least 50 discrete pieces of orbital debris from the rocket body. Ongoing tracking from 18SDS, which focuses on space domain awareness, now states that the debris cloud has grown to 350 objects associated with the rocket stage.

Based on the data, it appears the break-up occurred because the stage had an explosive event. It could have been programed to fire its engine to quickly de-orbit it and something went wrong. Or not. The Chinese have not demonstrated much concern about such issues.

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December 9, 2022 Quick space links

3:07 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

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Ancient lava flows down the flanks of the solar system’s largest volcano

11:52 am

Lava flows on Olympus Mons
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 2, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be very old and eroded lava on the northeast flanks of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano on Mars as well as the entire solar system. About 600 miles across, from the edge to its peak, Olympus rises about 54,000 feet, with an actual height relative to Mars’ “sea level” of just under 70,000 feet, more than twice as high as Mount Everest on Earth.

The white arrow show the downward grade. Several different flows can be seen throughout the picture, some confined to a central channel with smooth aprons of overflows on either side. Others are more broken and less coherent, and suggest that either the flows were inherently different, or are much older and have deteriorated with time.
» Read more

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Pushback: Students win $90K from University of Idaho for restricting their free speech

11:00 am

Idaho University bans religious speech
This college is still hostile to free speech.

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Three students who were punished last spring by the University of Idaho (UI) for daring to disagree publicly with an activist for the queer agenda have now won a $90K settlement as well as getting their records fully cleared.

As part of the settlement, university officials permanently rescinded the no-contact orders they had issued against Peter Perlot, Mark Miller, and Ryan Alexander, members of the Christian Legal Society chapter at the university, and Professor Richard Seamon, CLS’s faculty advisor, and paid $90,000.

I reported this case when it happened, noting that the university had essentially “decided that the only opinions that could be allowed were those that agreed with the queer political agenda, and acted unilaterally to punish these Christians for refusing to bow to that rule.” The university has now lost, and lost badly.
» Read more

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