Category: Behind The Black

Judge okays vote on whether SpaceX’s Boca Chica facility can incorporate as city

9:03 am

After reviewing the local petition submitted by SpaceX requesting permission, a local judge as signed an order allowing the citizens of Boca Chica to vote on whether they can incorporate as city in Texas.

The incorporation petition, [Cameron County Judge Eddie] Treviño explained, was duly signed by at least ten percent of the qualified voters of Starbase. Additionally, the petition satisfied the statutorily required elements and set forth satisfactory proof that Starbase contains the requisite number of inhabitants as required by law and the area to be incorporated is not part of another incorporated city or town.

Since the submitted petition met all statutory requirements, Treviño said he is required under Section 8.009 of the Texas Local Government Code to order that an incorporation election be held on a specific date and at a designate place in the community.

The election is set to occur during the general election on Saturday, May 3rd, 2025.

SpaceX itself had organized the petition and submitted it to the county in mid-December, noting that it already “…currently performs several civil functions around Starbase due to its remote location, including management of the roads, utilities, and the provision of schooling and medical care for the residents. Incorporation would move the management of some of these functions to a more appropriate public body.”

Expect the petition to be approved, making Starbase at Boca Chica one of the most spectacular company towns ever to exist.

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European underwater neutrino telescope detects most powerful neutrino ever

8:53 am

A European underwater neutrino telescope that is still under construction recorded evidence in February 2023 of most powerful neutrino particle ever detected.

KM3NeT’s two neutrino detectors — one off the coast of Sicily, the other near southern France — are still under construction but already collecting data. Both contain cables hundreds of meters tall, which are strung with bundles of light sensors anchored to the seafloor.

When cosmic neutrinos interact with matter in or near a KM3NeT detector, they spawn charged particles such as muons. As those muons careen through water, they give off feeble flashes of bluish light that KM3NeT’s sensors can pick up. Clocking when different sensors spot this light can reveal a particle’s path; the brightness of the blue hue reflects the particle’s energy.

On February 13, 2023, the detector near Sicily was run through by an extremely energetic muon traveling nearly parallel to the horizon. At the time, only 21 of the planned 230 sensor cables were in place. Based on the muon’s energy and trajectory, KM3NeT scientists determined it must have been spawned by a neutrino from space rather than a particle from the atmosphere.

Simulations suggest the neutrino’s energy was around 220 petaelectron volts. The previous record holder boasted around 10 petaelectron volts.

Tracking that trajectory backwards, astronomers say the particle came from a region of space where there are a lot of active galaxies, any one of which could be the source of the neutrino. It is also possible the neutrino came instead from an interaction of high energy cosmic rays and the photons from the faint microwave background left over from the Big Bang.

As noted very correctly by one scientist, “At this point, it’s very difficult to make conclusions about the origins,” says Kohta Murase, a theoretical physicist at Penn State not involved in the research. “It’s dangerous to rely on one event.”

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Hal Holbrook – Lincoln’s second inaugural address, in honor of his birthday

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I last posted a recreation in April 2017. Today, on Lincoln’s birthday, I present a recreation by Hal Holbrook, performed live on the Ed Sullivan Show on February 13, 1966.

As I wrote in 2017, “Listen to the words, however. This is no pandering speech, as we routinely see today. It is hard, muscled, and honest, bluntly recognizing that all, from both sides of the Civil War, must pay for the scourge of slavery.”

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Modern academia: “We aren’t going to hire another white guy, are we?”

1:52 pm

Whites need not apply
Whites need not apply.

The quote in the headline above comes from a lawsuit [pdf] filed by a former professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Stephen Kleinschmit, who was eventually terminated because he had raised concerns within his department about its hiring practices, which beginning in 2019 became entirely focused on choosing its new faculty employees solely on whether they were born to the correct race, not on their talents or qualifications.

Kleinschmit raised his concerns because he was required to participate in the hiring process, and feared if he did not do so it “would make him a participant in illegal activities for which he would be held liable.” Instead of recognizing the clearly discriminatory and illegal nature of its racial hiring practices, however, the department decided to terminate Kleinshcmit’s contract instead.

He was ultimately terminated in August 2023 spring semester, ostensibly as a result of the need for “budget cuts.” Kleinschmit said the decision to fire him at that time appeared to be intentional, to not only cut him loose from his job at UIC, but also deny him the opportunity to seek employment at another university for more than a year.

However, Kleinschmit said he – the department’s only white male faculty member – was the only faculty member terminated at that time, despite claims of lack of finances, even as UIC moved forward with plans to hire more “diverse” faculty.

The complaint noted that Kleinschmit’s old job was later posted as eligible for hiring. But now the job ad was written in a way to encourage non-white male applicants, “as UIC shifted resources to a new job focused on fulfilling its racially discriminatory goals.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the department fired its only white professor in order to replace him with a minority.
» Read more

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NASA announces March 12, 2025 as new launch date for next crew to ISS

9:47 am

NASA yesterday announced that it is now targeting March 12, 2025 as new launch date for sending the next crew to ISS, thus moving that date up about one week.

The earlier launch opportunity is available following a decision by mission management to adjust the agency’s original plan to fly a new Dragon spacecraft for the Crew-10 mission that requires additional processing time. The flight now will use a previously flown Dragon, called Endurance, and joint teams are working to complete assessments of the spacecraft’s previously flown hardware to ensure it meets the agency’s Commercial Crew Program safety and certification requirements. Teams will work to complete Dragon’s refurbishment and ready the spacecraft for flight, which includes trunk stack, propellant load, and transportation to SpaceX’s hangar at 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida to be mated with the mission’s Falcon 9 rocket. This will be the fourth mission to the station for this Dragon, which previously supported the agency’s Crew-3, Crew-5, and Crew-7 flights.

Both NASA and SpaceX are touting this as a great decision because it will allow the present ISS crew (which includes the two astronauts initially launched on Starliner last year) to get home quicker.

The truth is that this decision really hides the fact that both the agency and company made a wrong decision to use a new capsule for this mission. SpaceX needed more time than expected to prepare it, and those delays pushed back both the launch of a new crew and the return of the old. So, while everyone is spinning this as SpaceX and NASA brilliantly improvising to get those Starliner astronauts home sooner, the real story is that their return had been significantly delayed by almost two months by SpaceX’s inability to get the capsule ready as promised.

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Firefly wins $8.2 million grant from Texas Space Commission

9:36 am

The new Texas Space Commission, established in 2023 by the state legislature and appropriated $350 million to encourage the development of a Texas aerospace industry, has awarded the rocket and lunar lander company Firefly $8.2 million grant.

Firefly said the funding will result in an additional 5,600 square feet of cleanroom space at its 50,000-square-foot spacecraft facility in Cedar Park, as well as added ground and test equipment, a spacecraft pressure proof test facility at the 200-acre campus in Briggs that has 200,000-square-feet of facilities, and upgraded infrastructure for mission operations and labs. The company’s Cedar Park headquarters is 28,000 square feet. The improvements are expected to be completed by the end of this year.

The 50 jobs will be added in engineering, quality assurance, manufacturing and spacecraft operations, according to the announcement. The grant also will enable the company to expand STEM outreach and internship programs, including working with the schools in the University of Texas System to provide hands-on experience in spacecraft development.

Though the commission was given $350 million to help industry, in truth the legislature allocated $200 million of that money to build a new “research and training facility” at Texas A&M. While this might help encourage engineering students to come to Texas and thus settle there within the industry, to me it looks like the commission was mostly created to distribute a very large chunk of cash to this one university.

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Orbex scouts Saxaford in advance of first launch

9:25 am

Map of spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea

Though no details have been released, a team from the British rocket startup Orbex has arrived at the Saxaford spaceport in the Shetland Islands to begin preparations for the company’s first launch there, now planned to occur before the end of this year.

Originally Orbex was going to do its launches from the United Kingdom’s other proposed spaceport in Sutherland on the northern coast of Scotland. It had obtained a 50-year-lease to build its own dedicated launch facility, had built its rocket manufacturing facility nearby, and had originally hoped to do the first test orbital launch of its Prime rocket in 2022.

Three years later the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had still not issued Orbex or Sutherland the necessary launch licenses. Faced with bankruptcy if it didn’t launch soon, in December the company announced it was switching its first launch to Saxaford, where the CAA had completed spaceport licensing. It hoped the CAA would thus be able to give it a launch license quickly. We shall see.

Note that the news is slow today. As much as I want to post lots of stuff, I can’t if nothing of significance appears to be happening.

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Maybe the only way to reform academia is to shut it down and start over

2:37 pm

NC State: Maybe rotten to the core
NC State: Maybe it’s rotten to the core

Back in 2021, when I was reporting new blacklist stories every single day during the intolerant madness after the COVID panic and the death of George Floyd, I posted the blacklisting and attempted destruction of a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, merely because Stephen Porter had publicly questioned the wisdom and soundness of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.

Though administrators tried hard to push Porter out, he managed to survive, and is still teaching at NC State. Sadly however his attempt for justice failed, his lawsuit against this harassment and slander campaign eventually being dismissed by the courts.

Porter however decided he couldn’t simply close the book on the matter. For example, the leftist effort at NC State to silence all debate during this same time resulted in one university employee committing suicide. He couldn’t take the constant harassment, the doxxing of his home address, the vandalism at his home, and the slanders accusing him of being a racist and “white supremacist” wherever he went on campus, all based on no evidence at all.

Moreover, even though the board of governors of the North Carolina university system in 2023 established an “institutional neutrality” policy that forbid its colleges from requiring new students or faculty to endorse DEI or compel them to obey the pronoun demands of others, Porter kept finding NC State violating that policy, in word and deed.

He decided that he needed to fight back.
» Read more

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China and SpaceX complete launches

12:02 pm

Both China and SpaceX successfully completed launches today.

First, China completed the first launch of its Long March 8A rocket, an upgraded and more powerful version of its Long March 8 rocket. The rocket lifted off from China’s coastal Wencheng spaceport, and put the second batch (number unrevealed) of one of China’s new mega internet constellations.

Along with the basic Long March-8 model and the booster-free tandem configuration, it forms the Long March 8 series of rockets, providing a payload capacity range of 3 tons, 5 tons, and 7 tons to SSO. This significantly enhances China’s satellite networking capabilities for low and medium Earth orbits.

These rockets and the coastal spaceport will also allow China to steadily reduce its reliance on its older family of rockets that use toxic hypergolic fuels and launch from within China.

Next SpaceX launched another 21 Starliink satellites, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The first stage completed its 18th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The 2025 launch race:

19 SpaceX
7 China
1 Blue Origin
1 India
1 Japan
1 Russia
1 Rocket Lab

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Astronomers catalog large ring systems surrounding 74 stars

11:32 am

74 rings surrounding stars
Click for original image.

Using a variety of ground-based telescopes in many wavelengths, astronomers have now produced a detailed catalog of 74 stars with large dust rings similar to the Oort cloud that is believed to exist at the very outer fringes of our own solar system.

The image to the right, reduced to post here, shows all 74 stars.

The new gallery shows a remarkable diversity of structure in the belts. Some are narrow rings, while others are wider and could be categorized more as “disks” than “belts”. Moreover, some of the 74 exocomet systems have multiple rings or disks and some of those are “eccentric,” meaning not a circular orbit but more like an oval. This provides evidence that yet undetectable planets or perhaps moons are present and their gravity affects the distribution of pebbles in these systems.

You can read the paper here [pdf].

The press release implies the discovery of “exocomets” but that is not true. The belts and rings mapped are likely to have comets in them, but no such comets have been found.

The scientists say that this database can be used to better understand the formation of solar systems, though they also admit that the “limited (although much improved) size of our sample” makes any conclusions based on it very uncertain. They hope however that over time that sample size will grow.

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