Category: Behind The Black

Chinese astronauts undock from space station in return to Earth

10:07 am

The new colonial movement: Three Chinese astronauts, having completed their 90 day mission on China’s new space station, early today boarded their Shenzhou capsule and undocked from the station, with the expectation that they will return to Earth sometime tomorrow.

The astronauts have already set China’s record for the most time spent in space. After launching on June 17, mission commander Nie and astronauts Liu and Tang went on two spacewalks, deployed a 10-meter (33-foot) mechanical arm, and had a video call with Communist Party leader Xi Jinping.

Following their safe return, China will launch another unmanned cargo freighter to the station, followed by the launch of three more astronauts for another 90 day mission, continuing the station’s assembly construction. In addition to several more manned flights, in the next two years two more large modules will added.

NOTE: The New York Times actually did some good [and increasingly rare] journalism today to point out that the number of people presently in space, 14, is a record, beating the 13 that were on ISS in 2009. The difference now is that those spacefarers are on three different and very independent projects, ISS, the Chinese space program, and the first entirely private space mission launched by SpaceX.

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NASA awards small design lunar lander contracts to five companies

9:58 am

In what appears to be an effort by NASA to placate the losers in the bidding for the manned lunar lander contract, won by SpaceX’s Starship, the agency this week awarded small design contracts related to future lunar lander construction to five different companies, totaling $ 146 million and with the large bulk of the cash going to those losers.

The contracts were as follows:

  • Dynetics (a Leidos company) of Huntsville, Alabama, $40.8 million.
  • Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $35.2 million.
  • Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia, $34.8 million.
  • Blue Origin Federation of Kent, Washington, $25.6 million.
  • SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $9.4 million.

From the press release:

The selected companies will develop lander design concepts, evaluating their performance, design, construction standards, mission assurance requirements, interfaces, safety, crew health accommodations, and medical capabilities. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.

While the distribution of the money suggests NASA wishes to provide the most support to the companies that lost the bid, it also gives us a hint of what the agency presently thinks of those losers. Of the losers, Blue Origin received the least, suggesting that NASA remains skeptical of that company’s effort. It also might be NASA’s signal to Blue Origin that endless lawsuits and protests — rather than actual construction — is not a good way to make friends and influence people. This conclusion is reinforced by the fact that Dynetics received the most cash, even though like Blue Origin it has yet to launch anything into orbit.

This distribution of money is also part of the typical pattern of DC crony capitalism, designed almost like pay offs to capture these companies and make them partners in the Washington swamp.

One big space company, Boeing, however received nothing. The company might not have submitted a proposal, but I suspect that if it did, NASA dismissed it outright based on the agency’s decision last year to eliminate Boeing from such contract considerations because of the incredible weakness of its recent bids. I think that Boeing will remain on the outs until it finally gets Starliner flying and operational.

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SpaceX leases several large facilities in Brownsville, Texas

9:36 am

Capitalism in space: In a clear sign that SpaceX plans to expand its Starship/Superheavy operations in Boca Chica, Texas, it has now leased several large facilities in nearby Brownsville.

Earlier this month, the company signed leases with the Brownsville South Padre Island Airport (BRO) for 46,000 square feet of warehouse space and a neighboring private industrial park owned by PacVentures for 60,000 square feet of warehouse space. Francisco Partida, the airport’s special projects manager, said talks with SpaceX about leasing the former Taylorcraft building at 2100 Les Mauldin Road began in mid-July.

The company was looking for 100,000 square feet of warehouse, which the airport couldn’t supply, though SpaceX found the additional square footage it needed in the privately owned industrial park at 1900 Billy Mitchell Blvd., he said.

SpaceX has also committed about a half million dollars to repairing and refurbishing the airport warehouse.

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Astronaut’s mission on ISS will be extended to almost a year

9:30 am

As expected because the Russian’s have taken his return seat in October to bring home two commercial passengers (a film director and his star actress), the mission of astronaut Mark Vande Hei has been extended to March for a total of 353 days in space, just short of a year.

This time will exceed the previous American record for the longest spaceflight, set by Scott Kelly during his 340 day mission in 2015. It remains below about four Russian flights that lasted a full year or more, including the longest flight so far by Valeri Polyakov of 438 days in 1993 and 1994.

Meanwhile, there is no word on the state of the pinched nerve that forced NASA to replace Vande Hei on an upcoming spacewalk. It is likely that weightlessness is probably helping it heal, but NASA and Vande Hei are presently keeping this personal medical information private.

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The real human exploration of the solar system began on September 15, 2021

11:26 pm

Falcon 9 at T+13 seconds

Capitalism in space: First the news: On September 15, 2021 SpaceX successfully placed four civilians into orbit using its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule.

Thus began the first private manned orbital mission in space, planned to last three days and reach an altitude of 595 kilometers or 370 miles, the highest any person has flown in space in decades.

The first stage, on its third flight, successfully landed for reuse. The Dragon capsule, Resilience, was on its second manned flight. The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

31 China
23 SpaceX
15 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. now leads China 34 to 31 in the national rankings.

Now the significance: There was one moment about five minutes after lift off that revealed the fundamental difference between this real flight into space and the short suborbital hops that Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic did in July.

The three most critical moments of any launch had just been completed. The first stage engines had cut off, the first stage had separated successfully, and the single upper stage engine had ignited. It was now lifting the capsule towards orbit, with the only major technical task left were its engine cut off and the separation of the Dragon capsule.

At that moment John Insprucker, principal integretion engineer for SpaceX and frequent host during its launch live streams, made a quick comment that was clearly meant to illustrate the vast difference in achievement between this flight and those two July suborbital flights. He said,
» Read more

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Lozenge-shaped hole in Martian crater

12:15 pm

Hole in crater floor
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on June 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The left image shows what the scientists have dubbed a “lozenge-shaped depression” in the middle of an unnamed 60-mile-wide crater in the southern cratered highlands of Mars. The right image shows the same exact depression, but I have brightened the photo in order to see the details in the shadowed depression.

Though the image is inconclusive, the bottom of the darkest spot in that depression cannot be seen, suggesting it could be an entrance into a larger void below.

Even if there is no voids below, why is this depression here? What caused it? The wider view of MRO’s context camera below might give us a hint.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Father whose 16-year-old healthy son died right after getting COVID vaccine banned from social media

11:03 am

The new dark age of silencing: A father has been banned by GoFundMe and Twitter when he tried to raise money to make the public aware that the COVID vaccine carried its own risks, and might even have killed his healthy 16-year-old son, who died from an enlarged heart only days after getting the shot.

GoFundMe banned Ernest Ramirez for sharing “prohibited conduct” on the crowdfunding platform. His so-called unacceptable behavior was fundraising for his late son, Ernesto Jr., who died from the Pfizer vaccine on April 25.

The father used the page to explain how his only 16 year-old son was in good health, and regularly played baseball since he was 7 years-old. Advertising claimed the vaccine is safe for adolescents, and convinced him to book-in Ernesto Jr. for the jab on April 19. Five days later the teenager died from a dilated heart. “My son received the vaccine and he died a few days later, and the only explanation that was given to me was an enlarged heart,” Ramirez said according to Life Site News. “I love the hell out of my country but I do not trust my government anymore.”

Many people started donating to the grieving Texan. However, the father became outraged to learn GoFundMe had shut down the page and returned all proceeds back to donors. [emphasis mine]

The point is not that the various vaccines might be dangerous (that is not yet proved, though the evidence is beginning to strongly suggest they carry risks especially for young men). The point is that this poor man was blacklisted merely because he was saying things GoFundMe and Twitter did not like. Who gave them the final say on what we discuss about these vaccines? Where was it written that only their opinions are allowed?

If anything, the more discussion on this subject, the better. If the anecdotal evidence that suggests there are risks gets seen by enough people, the outcry might force some real research that will tell us for certain if those risks are real or not. Silencing the discussion only causes more distrust (as illustrated by the highlighted words above), and might even permit the use of unsafe drugs for longer than necessary.

Yet, silencing now is our leftist elitist class’s standard operating procedure, to the point of not allowing a grieving father to raise some important questions about the medicine that might have killed his son.

Our bankrupt “betters” cannot allow such questions. They are not interested in open debate. They only want everyone to kow-tow to their dictatorial demands, and will do whatever is necessary to silence dissent.

I say, do not shut up. Do not comply. Make them sweat. Make them scream. The left’s inability to debate rationally and with intelligence only leaves them open for defeat, if only people are willing to challenge them. And now is the time to challenge them. Later will be too late.

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Watching the first all-private commercial manned orbital spaceflight

11:20 pm

Liberty and freedom enlightening the world
Liberty and freedom enlightening not only the world,
but the entire solar system.

Bumped: I will be out on a cave trip for most of today, September 15, 2021, so I’ve moved this post to the top of the page, as it clearly will be the most important space news today. I should be back before launch, but if not, enjoy!

Original post:
————————
Capitalism in space: Let’s begin by underlining one fundamental fact about the Inspiration4 manned Dragon orbital space mission, targeted for a September 15th launch tomorrow evening, that makes it different from every other orbital space mission ever flown since Yuri Gagarin completed the first manned mission in 1961:

The government has nothing to do with it.

The launch facilities, the rocket, the capsule, the drone ship where the rocket’s first stage will land, and the entire recovery operation in the ocean are all controlled and owned by SpaceX. The passengers are private citizens, one of whom purchased the flight directly from SpaceX.

It is was organized by 38-year-old billionaire and entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, who is also a highly-capable jet warbird aircraft pilot. When he found out from SpaceX he could be the first to fly an all-commercial mission in Crew Dragon, he fronted $100 million to $200 million required and partnered with St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in a campaign to give away two of the missions seats and raise $200 Million for children’s cancer research.

Every person you will see in mission control, at the launchpad, and on the recovery ships are also private citizens, working for a private company that just happens to be in the business of flying rockets, spaceships, and humans into space. None are government employees, and I would suspect that most don’t want to be.

Not only is this mission privately run, its goals are completely different. While all past space launches were flown for purposes decided by the government, this mission’s goals have been determined by the free participants themselves. SpaceX is making money on the flight, Isaacman and his passengers are getting the chance to fulfill their long-held personal dream of going into space, and Isaacman is also using this flight to raise money for cancer research, a personal passion of his.

The flight itself will be unusual. It will be the first manned mission in more than a decade, since the last shuttle repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, to not go to an orbiting space station. Instead, the capsule will spend three days free-flying in orbit around the Earth. To enhance the flight for the passengers, SpaceX removed the docking port on Resilience (the capsule) and replaced it with a viewing port with large windows.

The orbit itself will in a sense push the envelope, as SpaceX plans to loft the capsule to an altitude of about 370 miles, considerably higher than ISS’s orbit of about 260 miles and about 35 miles higher than the mission to Hubble. In fact, the Inspiration4 crew will be the farthest from the Earth’s surface than any human in decades, possibly going back as far as the Apollo era.

For watching this flight I have embedded SpaceX’s live stream below, which you can also find here. You will also be able to find that stream at SpaceX’s YouTube page, where the company is also airing preflight videos.

This mission illustrates the fundamentals that built the United States of America. Give humans freedom, don’t try to tell them what to do, and they will do astonishing and magnificent things, on their own.
» Read more

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Russia launches another set of OneWeb satellites

2:03 pm

Using its Soyuz-2 rocket Russia today successfully launched another 34 OneWeb satellites, launching from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

At the time of publication about half the satellites have successfully deployed. The rest should be released within the next hour or so.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

31 China
22 SpaceX
15 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

With this launch Russia has now matched its total launches from last year, with three months still to go and a number of launches in ’21 on its manifest. For Russia’s launch industry, 2021 looks like it will be a good year.

The U.S. continues to lead China 33 to 31 in the national rankings.

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The layered history of Mars as revealed in Valles Marineris

1:01 pm

Layered cliff in Valles Marineris
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced, shows just one tiny cliff face in the gigantic canyon on Mars dubbed Valles Marineris. The photo was taken on June 13, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Like many other similar cliff faces that MRO has photographed and that I have previously highlighted, there are many many layers visible here. In fact, it appears that almost every cliff in this part of Valles Marineris is many layered, suggesting that like the Grand Canyon on Earth, the canyon as it was carved exposed in great detail the long geological history of Mars.

In this part of Mars, each layer probably represents the placementof a new layer of volcanic material, pouring out from the giant volcanoes in the Tharsis Bulge to the west. In addition, overlain on this volcanic record are probably deposits lain down by the atmosphere as Mars underwent its many climate cycles due to the regular shifts in its orbit and rotational tilt.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Professor who uncovered academic incompetence has been forced to resign from Portland State University

11:41 am

Liberty and freedom banned
No liberty at Portland State University. Photo credit: William Zhang

The new dark age of silencing: Peter Boghossian, one of three professors who revealed the incompetence and bad scholarship that now permeates academic culture by writing and getting published a fake paper in 2017 that claimed the penis was merely a “social construct,” has finally been forced to resign from his position at Portland State University in Oregon because of the never-ending harassment and slanders that he has been subjected to by both faculty and staff there.

“Administrators and faculty were so angered by the papers that they published an anonymous piece in the student paper and Portland State filed formal charges against me,” Boghossian wrote in his statement. ”Their accusation? ‘Research misconduct’ based on the absurd premise that the journal editors who accepted our intentionally deranged articles were ‘human subjects.’ I was found guilty of not receiving approval to experiment on human subjects.”

The school subsequently barred Boghossian from conducting research.

But according to Boghossian, he suffered far more abuse on campus than merely being sanctioned for his prank. “I’d find flyers around campus of me with a Pinocchio nose. I was spit on and threatened by passersby while walking to class,” he wrote. “I was informed by students that my colleagues were telling them to avoid my classes. And, of course, I was subjected to more investigation.”

…He also noted he was once the subject of a baseless investigation that tarred him as someone who commits violence against women. “My accuser, a white male, made a slew of baseless accusations against me, which university confidentiality rules unfortunately prohibit me from discussing further,” Boghossian wrote. “What I can share is that students of mine who were interviewed during the process told me the Title IX investigator asked them if they knew anything about me beating my wife and children. This horrifying accusation soon became a widespread rumor.”

Boghossian apparently had had enough. However, he is not running away, but instead leaving to form a new organization to specifically fight the close-minded and oppressive culture that now dominates most universities like Portland State.
» Read more

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Make concrete on Mars using human blood?

9:17 am

What could possibly go wrong? Scientists at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom have developed a new formulation that can use material known to exist on Mars, combined with the addition of astronaut blood, to produce useful concrete.

Working with simulated lunar and Martian soils, the team experimented with using human blood and waste products as binding material, and turned up some interesting results.

The work showed that a common protein in the blood called serum albumin could be used as a binder to produce a concrete-like material with compressive strength comparable to ordinary concrete. In investigating the mechanisms at play, the team found the blood proteins “curdle” to form “beta sheets” that extend outward to hold the material together.

Even more interestingly, the team found that urea, a waste product found in urine, sweat and tears, could be incorporated to increase this compressive strength by more than 300 percent. That is to say, the key to cosmic concrete stronger than what we have here on Earth might be found in our blood, sweat and tears (and urine).

This work was inspired by ancient building techniques, which often used pig blood in concrete for similar reasons.

Though a lot of this makes sense, especially the utilization of waste products like urine, the idea that future colonies will tap the blood of their citizens for construction purposes raises so many moral questions I can’t list them all here.

For example, let me throw out one possibility should no one think about this too much on Mars. Why not use this need for blood as a method of criminal punishment? Do something the ruling powers think is wrong and we will suck your blood from you to build the colony!

The moral consequences of our actions require long careful thought. Unfortunately, long careful thought simply no longer exists among today’s intellectual and political classes. Instead, they make almost all their decisions off the cuff, based on what “feels” right to them. You merely have to watch the many interviews of Dr. Anthony Fauci in the past year to see what I mean. Nothing he says about masks or mandates is really based on new research or data. He merely throws out an opinion that feels right, at the moment. Thus, he contradicts himself repeatedly, and most of his advice has been worse than useless, resulting in so many unexpected negative consequences they almost cannot be counted.

Try to imagine the horrors that could take place in a colony on Mars, where resources are in short supply, should construction require the use of human blood and the leadership there approaches its problems with the same cavalier attitude toward moral consequences? I can, and it chills my own blood to the core (no pun intended).

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Utilizing a commercial lunar probe to reach geosynchronous orbit around the Earth

8:56 am

Capitalism in space: The commercial startup SpaceFlight Inc has purchased payload space on Intuitive Machines’ second lunar landing mission to the Moon late in ’22 in order to test its Sherpa Escape space tug’s ability to use that flight path to place a satellite into geosynchronous orbit around the Earth.

The tug will also carry the payload of another company, GeoJump, which will test in-space fueling technology developed by another company, Orbit Fab.

Sounds complicated, eh? It isn’t when you think about it. When NASA gave up ownership and design of its lunar landers and instead began buying such products from the private sector, it freed up that private sector to sell its spare payload capacity to anyone who wanted it. On this particular flight Intuitive Machines sold that spare capacity to SpaceFlight, which in turn provided GeoJump and Orbit Fab the space tug for getting their experimental payloads to geosynchronous orbit.

This is a win-win for everyone. Not only are two companies (Intuitive Machines and Spaceflight) making money by selling their capabilities to others, two other companies (GeoJump and Orbit Fab) are now able to test their own space innovations at a much lower cost, and much more quickly than had they depended on a government launch from NASA.

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SpaceX successfully launches another 51 Starlink satellites

9:15 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch another 51 Starlink satellites into orbit.

At publication, the deployment of the satellites is still about 25 minutes away. [Update: deployment successful.] SpaceX now has about 1,500 working Starlink satellites in orbit.

The Falcon 9’s first stage successfully landed on its drone ship, the tenth flight of this stage, tying the record for the most reuses. Both fairings were also reused. This was also the first Starlink launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base. SpaceX intends to do monthly Starlink launches from Vandenberg for the rest of the year.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

31 China
22 SpaceX
14 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. now leads China 33 to 31 in the national rankings.

SpaceX will also launch in two days the first ever entirely private orbital mission to space, whereby it has been hired to carry four private astronauts for three days on the highest orbit since the 2009 last shuttle mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope.

That flight will inaugurate a schedule of almost monthly private manned commercial missions to orbit, extending into next year and possibly forever. The present schedule:

  • September 15, 2021: SpaceX’s Dragon capsule flies four private citizens on a three day orbital flight
  • October 2021: The Russians will fly two passengers to ISS for 10 days to shoot a movie
  • December 2021: The Russians will fly billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant to ISS for 12 days
  • cDecember 2021: Space Adventures, using a Dragon capsule, will fly four in orbit for five days
  • January 2022: Axiom, using a Dragon capsule, will fly four tourists to ISS
  • 2022-2024: Three more Axiom tourist flights on Dragon to ISS
  • 2024: Axiom begins launching its own modules to ISS, starting construction of its own private space station
  • c2024: SpaceX’s Starship takes Yusaku Maezawa and several others on a journey around the Moon.
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An example why scientists think there were catastrophic floods on Mars

1:30 pm

Broken mesas on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image provides a nice illustration why scientists have long assumed that in the distance past there had been catastrophic floods of liquid water on Mars. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on July 6, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows an east-west gully cutting between mesas to the north and south.

Because the highest mesas seem to be aligned, this suggests they were once part of the same formation, and something came along to carve that gap and gully between them.

What made the break? The overview map below as usual provides some context, which also provides a possible explanation.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Man demoted, essentially fired, for simply requesting religious exemption from COVID vaccination

11:44 am

They’re coming for you next: The superintendent of the Cartwright school district in Arizona, Dr. Lee-Ann Aguilar-Lawlor, immediately demoted William Bishop from his job as director for buildings and operations to that of a substitute teacher, essentially firing him from regular employment, because he had simply requested religious exemption from getting the COVID vaccination.

When he made his request the school district never even responded to it. Instead, they demoted him.

Bishop is being represented by First Liberty, the same legal firm defending the two Alaska Airline flight attendants fired for daring to ask questions. From their letter to Aguilar-Lawlor:

Cartwright’s actions are particularly indefensible because: (1) it already granted at least one nonreligious exemption from the mandate; (2) its demotion of Mr. Bishop will bring him into far more contact with students and other staff, thus contradicting the district’s presumed rationale for refusing to grant his accommodation request; (3) it chose not to impose its mandate on teachers, those most in contact with students and staff; (4) 21 percent of district employees remain unvaccinated; and (5) Mr. Bishop has natural immunity and his doctor advises against receiving the vaccine.

In other words, Bishop’s demotion was arbitrary and capricious, a clear case of blacklisting by Aguilar-Lawlor. She was punishing Bishop because he wasn’t meekly bowing to her will.

What really should happen is that Aguilar-Lawlor should be fired, because she has now demonstrated a bias and incompetence that makes her unqualified for her job. She clearly is bigoted against the religious, and is willing to take petty but very harmful action to hurt such people.

Rick, stating the truth in Casablanca
Still asleep, and tragically, they refuse to wake up.

This unfortunately is almost certainly not what will happen. People like Aguilar-Lawlor are now in power, and they will do everything possible to maintain that position, including smashing their fist into the face of anyone who questions them.

Worst of all, they will get the enthusiastic support of too many people, all of whom are willing to treat others as scum because they live in fear of a virus with a survival rate exceeding 99%, even if you aren’t vaccinated against it! And their power will be further enhanced by the millions who have decided this isn’t their problem, and will simply look the other way. “Someone else will help that poor woman being raped.”

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DC swamp moving to cancel Trump effort to cut red tape at FAA?

9:12 am

The inspector general of the Department of Transportation has instigated an investigation into the FAA’s recent effort, inaugurated during the Trump administration, to reduce the air space shuttered during launch operations in order to allow more launches with less interference with commercial air traffic.

“Over the past 5 years, FAA has gone from licensing about one commercial space launch per month to now licensing more than one launch every week,” Matthew Hampton, the assistant inspector general for aviation audits, said Wednesday in a memo announcing the probe.

The audit was requested by the ranking members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and its Subcommittee on Aviation, Hampton said in the memo. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted words are important. The “ranking members” in the House are Republicans. It appears members of the party supposedly in favor of free enterprise have decided to panic after the relatively minor flight deviation due to high winds that occurred during the Virgin Galactic suborbital flight in July, and are now working to shut down the FAA’s effort to launch more rockets while keeping commercial aviation functioning.

The recent decision to begin shrinking the restricted air space around launches results from the increasing sophistication of rockets. Though new rockets — such as the recent launch failures of Astra’s Rocket-3 and Firefly’s Alpha — do fail and require self-destruction during launch, the launch and flight termination technology today works quite well in better controlling the rocket. When something went wrong during both of these recent launches, the rockets compensated so that they were able to continue to fly to a much higher altitude, where the range officer could more safely destroy them. In the past, failing rockets such as these would have gone out of control, threatening a larger area both in the air and on the ground.

Thus, there now is less need to restrict as much space, unless you have the fantasy that you must rig things so that nothing can ever go wrong.

This fantasy has fueled the entire Wuhan flu panic. It rules the minds of many Washington bureaucrats and politicians, from both parties, who repeatedly declare that “If we can save one life, we must!” Meanwhile this vain effort fails in its main task, since things still go wrong, and the overwrought effort to overly protect people ends up doing more harm than good by squelching all achievement.

It now appears there are Republicans on both the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure and its Subcommittee on Aviation who believe in this fantasy. No wonder the Democrats always win in legislative battles. They have many hidden Republican allies.

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Another technical problem identified in Virgin Galactic spaceship

8:37 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic announced late Friday, when few would notice it, that a new technical problem has been identified with its Virgin Galactic spaceship.

In a statement issued late Sept. 10, Virgin Galactic said a third-party supplier, which it did not identify, notified the company of a potential manufacturing defect in a flight control actuation system component. Virgin said it is conducting inspections with the vendor to determine if the suspect component needs to be repaired or replaced.

Because of the inspections, Virgin Galactic said the earliest it would perform the next SpaceShipTwo mission, called Unity 23, is the middle of October. The company had previously stated the mission would take place in late September or early October.

This issue is completely independent from the flight path anomaly that occurred during the July suborbital flight that has caused the FAA to ground Virgin Galactic.

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Data from Opportunity suggests surface dew periodically appears even in the dry equatorial regions

4:43 pm

Using data from the rover Opportunity, scientists now think that the renewal of Martian salt crusts on rock surfaces on the rim of Endeavour Crater could possibly by caused by the appearance of rare thin wetting events, and that such events could have even occurred very recently and be on-going..

The scientists looked at the rate of erosion and renewal of the salt crusts, and found them to be in a steady state. The erosion is slow, taking from 200,000 to 2,000,000 years to remove 1 to 2 millimeters. However, periodically a thin film of water or wetting occurs, not unlike dew on Earth, which quickly acts to renew the crust. As David Mittlefehldt of the Astromaterials Research Office at the Johnson Space Center and the lead author of the paper explained to me,

Taken together, the data leaves open the possibility the salt mobilization has occurred within the last few thousand years. It could be ongoing in the sense that over a period of thousands? or hundreds? of years it might happen again.

In other words, the evidence suggests that every few hundred or thousand years the surface of these rocks gets wet, which results in the placement of a new thin layer of salt crusts.

Mittlefehldt also emphasized to me that these wetting events are rare, and “there is also the case that such an event may never come again because of changing conditions.”

The situation is essentially like on Earth, where in some places hydrologists measure the size of floods by how rare they are. A 1,000 year flood is big, but it happens very rarely. At Endeavour Crater these wetting events are comparably rare, but they do not involve big floods, but a mere moistening of the ground.

The location of Endeavour Crater is about 2 degrees south latitude, so it sits in the dry equatorial regions where no surface or near surface ice has so far been found. However, the cyclic nature of Mars’ orbit and obliquity could have changed this in the past, and could change this again in the future. At this time we simply don’t have enough information to know.

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Door-to-door canvas of voters in Arizona finds extensive evidence of vote tampering

1:45 pm

A door-to-door canvas of voters in Maricopa County in Arizona, conducted by an organization independent of the audit being done by the state legislature, found extensive evidence of vote tampering in the count of mail-in ballots..

An estimated 173,104 “missing or lost” votes were reported by canvassers who went door-to-door verifying registration and voting information for thousands of residents.

According to the report: “These are American citizens living in Maricopa County who cast a vote, primarily by mail, in the election and yet there is no record of their vote with the county and it was not counted in the reported vote totals for the election. Additionally an estimated 96,389 mail-in votes were cast under the names of registered voters who were either unknown to the residents of the registration address or who were verified as having moved away prior to October 2020.”

A large percentage of in person voters also had “mail-in” ballots counted in the election, the canvas found.

The canvas visited about 12,000 voters in Maricopa county, so the estimates above are extrapolations of the data actually obtained. You can read the actual report here [pdf] .

In going door-to-door, however, the canvas appears to have compared what was actually recorded by the board of elections with what the voters themselves now claim. While it is possible that when asked months later how they voted voters could misremember whether they voted by mail, in person, or even at all, it is unlikely that so many would get it wrong. The numbers thus strongly suggest that something fishy was going on in the county election board in tabulating these mail-in ballots, either because of incompetence or downright dishonesty.

That the county’s board of elections has stonewalled all investigations adds considerable weight to this conclusion.

The report’s main conclusion however is the most important. We should ban mail-in voting, as it puts one’s vote in the hands of additional third parties, at the post office and at the election boad, any one of whom can take actions to negate or change your vote.

Vote in person. Throw away that mail-in ballot. Stop making it easy for crooks to cheat.

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On the edge of Mars’ glacier country

1:25 pm

Color dry mesas on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image sits right on the southern edge of Mars’ northern glacier country, at 29 degrees north latitude. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken of this location on June 4, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be the exposed and scraped bedrock and mesas on the floor of an unnamed 60-mile-wide crater.

That scraped bedrock is quite beautiful, reminiscent of the bare carved mesas and bedrock one sees throughout the southwest of the United States. To hike from that central valley to the top of the bright mesa would be a fine experience, especially because of the suggested change in colors in the color strip.

The overview map below gives more context.
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Sunspot update: Activity declines in August to just above prediction

12:02 pm

On September 1st NOAA released its update of its monthly sunspot cycle graph, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity for the past month. That graph is below, annotated to show the previous solar cycle predictions and thus provide context.

In August sunspot activity dropped from July so that it was only slightly above the prediction of NOAA’s panel of solar scientists, as indicated by the red curve. The blank streak at the very end of July ended on August 2nd (a streak of seven days and the longest in years), but was followed during the month by an additional five blank days.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Two flight attendants fired by Alaska Airlines for asking questions

11:28 am

The Civil Rights Act of 1964: not applicable to Alaska Airlines
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Apparently Alaska Airlines thinks
it doesn’t apply to them.

Lacey Smith, a former flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, found herself fired from her job when she did exactly what Alaska Airlines had requested, joining the company’s online discussion group debating its decision to publicly support a leftist bill in Congress that religious people have concerns about.

What horrible thing did Lacey Smith do in that discussion group? She simply asked a question.

Alaska Airlines issued a statement on the employees’ message board declaring support for the “Equality” Act—the deceptively named legislation that’s currently stalling in the Senate. As First Liberty [the legal firm defending Lacey] has explained, this bill poses a serious threat to religious freedom if it becomes law.

As a Christian, Lacey has concerns about the ramifications of the “Equality” Act—as do millions of Americans.

So, when Alaska Airlines invited employees to comment and ask questions about the company’s support for the “Equality” Act, Lacey took the opportunity to respond on the company message board.

She asked, “As a company, do you think it’s possible to regulate morality?”

This was all she did, ask this one simple question, doing exactly what the company requested. The result? According to the video at the link,
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Facebook and Ray-Ban selling sunglasses able to take pictures also

9:54 am

Your privacy belongs to us! Facebook and Ray-Ban have teamed up to create sunglasses that the wearer can use to discreetly to take pictures of their surroundings.

The Ray-Ban Stories eyewear features two 5-MP front-facing cameras for 2,592 x 1,944-pixel photos or 1,184 x 1,184-pixel videos at 30 frames per second.

A capture button is pushed to snap photo memories of what you see on your stroll through the city on a hot and sunny day, or record 30-second video clips to post online to such platforms as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok via a new Facebook View app for iOS and Android. The app also allows content to be edited or enhanced before upload, and saved to the phone’s memory, though the smart glasses do have enough built-in storage for more than 500 photos or 30 video clips. Or users can opt to for hands-free operation via Facebook Assistant voice commands.

The article describes several features that supposedly address the questions of privacy, such as led lights that glow when a picture is taken, but in the end these glasses are essentially a voyeur’s dream.

Without question such products have their legitimate uses, such as by undercover journalists or criminal investigators. To market them to the general public however means that both Facebook and Ray-Ban are willing to ignore concerns of right and wrong and the likelihood that their product will be badly misused for entire immoral reasons. All they care about is profit.

Or maybe the two companies are really developing this product to sell a more secretive version to their allies in the government. One does wonder.

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