Category: Behind The Black

Amazon delays offering Kuiper broadband service to ’25

9:06 am

Though Amazon still has plans to begin launching satellites of its internet Kuiper constellation late this year, it revealed yesterday that it will now delay operational availability of the service to the public until 2025.

Amazon had earlier aimed to start deploying more than 3,200 satellites in the first half of 2024 to begin beta trials with potential customers, including Verizon in the United States. However, the company now expects to ship the first production satellites this summer to Florida for the launch with United Launch Alliance from its recently opened factory in Kirkland, Washington.

In order to offer the product to the public Amazon needs to have a certain number of satellites in orbit. Moreover, the company’s FCC license required it to launch half of this constellation by 2026, so meeting that deadline is getting increasingly difficult. Amazon has contracts to launch satellites 46 times on ULA rockets (8 on Atlas-5 and 36 on Vulcan), 27 times on Blue Origin’s New Glenn, 18 times on ArianeGroup’s Ariane-6, and 3 times on SpaceX’s Falcon-9.

By the time Amazon begins selling Kuiper, Starlink will have been available for about four years. For Amazon to grab market share will be thus difficult, unless it offers its product for significantly less.

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Susan Boyle – I Dreamed a Dream

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This was her first appearance as a singer, on the television show Britain’s Got Talent, airing on April 11, 2009. It is a glorious TV moment. Much of it I think was planned, at least by the producers, though the judges and audience almost certainly had no idea what they were about to hear. Enjoy. Fun to watch over and over.

Hat tip James Street.

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Supreme Court to SEC: Use of in-house administrative law judges unconstitutional

1:43 pm

SEC: no longer above the law
SEC: no longer above the law

The Supreme Court today ruled 6-3 that the SEC has violated the Constitution with its use of in-house administrative law judges to rule on its various securities fraud cases.

The agency, like other regulators, brings some enforcement actions in internal tribunals rather than in federal courts. The S.E.C.’s practice, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for a six-justice majority in a decision divided along ideological lines, violated the right to a jury trial. “A defendant facing a fraud suit has the right to be tried by a jury of his peers before a neutral adjudicator,” the chief justice wrote.

This ruling against the use of administrative law judges has a direct bearing on SpaceX’s own lawsuit [pdf] against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). In January the NLRB filed a complaint against SpaceX, accusing it of firing eight employees illegally for writing a public letter criticizing the company in 2022. Rather than fight that complaint directly, SpaceX’s response was to file a lawsuit challenging the very legal structure of the NLRB itself, including its use of administrative law judges.
» Read more

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Japanese government proposes 300-mile-long conveyor belt for moving packages

12:27 pm

Pork to the max! A supposedly “expert panel” in Japanese government’s Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry has proposed building a 300-mile-long conveyor belt — possibly underground in a tunnel — between the cities of Tokyo and Osaka for moving packages, to be completed by 2034.

The biggest challenge is cost. According to a survey of construction companies, the cost of building an underground tunnel ranges from ¥7 billion to ¥80 billion per 10 kilometers, so a system linking Tokyo and Osaka would cost up to ¥3.7 trillion. When the ministry in the year 2000 first planned logistics links above ground, it estimated construction costs of ¥25.4 billion per 10 kilometers.

In dollars, the total cost of ¥3.7 trillion equals about $23 billion.

The so-called goal would be to eliminate 25,000 trucks, supposedly saving the world from those evil fossil fuels. That the belt would have to be powered of course is not mentioned, which I bet would probably require burning about the same amount of fuel.

The panel also claimed the conveyor belt would save money and reduce labor needs because it would also eliminate 25,000 truck drivers. With Japan facing a crash in population, the panel claims a shortage of labor is expected in the coming decades, and this plan will supposedly solve that. That’s also a fantasy. Who would upload the pallets onto the belt? Who would offload them? And how would those pallets be delivered at each point? And what about maintaining this giant conveyor belt? In the end, this plan will do nothing to reduce labor needs.

Nor is such a plan really necessary. When the population drops, the amount of cargo will drop as well. There will be no labor shortage in the shipping industry.

All this plan does is create a gigantic public works project that will almost certainly go over budget, fail to meet its schedule, and increase the cost of goods for both the companies and the public. But boy, it sure is going to employ a lot of government workers to supervise construction and operations!

Note I found about this project through a report at New Atlas, which as a left-leaning techno website accepted the plan instantly as brilliant and awe-inspiring.

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Juno infrared data confirms existence of at least eleven lava lakes on Io

11:53 am

Cartoon describing Io's lava lakes
Click for original image.

Using infrared data from the Jupiter orbiter Juno, obtained during a close fly-by in May 2023 of the moon Io, scientists have identified what appear to be at least eleven active lava lakes, all filled with liquid magma under a surface crust and having a stable perimeter that apparently does not overflow the rim.

You can read the research paper here. The graphic to the right is figure 6 from the paper, describing two models for explaining why the lava in these lakes never rises high enough to pour out.

Unlike the April fly-by, which got as close as 10,777 miles and produced some amazing imagery, the May fly-by only got within 22,000 miles, but its course allowed Juno’s infrared instruments to collect good global data for six hours.

The JIRAM data reveal a common set of thermal characteristics for at least ten patera, with bright “thermal rings” around the perimeter of their floors. Loki, Surt, Fuchi, Amaterasu, Mulungu, Chors, and Dazhbog paterae, two unnamed paterae (here referred to as UP1 and UP2), and two other potential additional paterae (not discussed further because the spatial resolution is poor), all show the same pattern of surface temperatures.

That data suggested that each patera was a hot lava lake, with a stable rim in which little magma ever overflowed. As the scientists conclude in their paper, “Present findings highlight Io’s abundant lava reserves, resembling lava lakes on Earth in some ways, yet distinctly different from any other phenomena observed in the Solar System.” The scientists also note that no missions are being planned right now to get a better look at Io.

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SpaceX now valued at $210 billion

10:46 am

As part of another sale of insider shares to raise more private investment capital, SpaceX has now been valued at $210 billion.

SpaceX will sell shares at $112 each in the tender offer, the Bloomberg report said, with the newer sales valuing the company much higher than a $180 billion valuation seen during a tender offer in December.

The report does not say how many shares SpaceX hopes to sell, or how much total new capital it hopes to obtain. Previous such sales have raised a total of $12 billion, money the company is using to develop both its Starlink constellation and its Starship/Superheavy rocket.

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Engineers revive instrument on Perseverance

10:41 am

Engineers in the Perseverance science team have successfully gotten a stuck cover moved so that it no longer blocked a camera and spectroscopic instrument mounted on the rover’s robot arm from gathering data.

The cover had gotten stuck partially closed in January 2024.

Analysis by the SHERLOC team pointed to the malfunction of a small motor responsible for moving the protective lens cover as well as adjusting focus for the spectrometer and the Autofocus and Context Imager (ACI) camera. By testing potential solutions on a duplicate SHERLOC instrument at JPL, the team began a long, meticulous evaluation process to see if, and how, the lens cover could be moved into the open position.

Among many other steps taken, the team tried heating the lens cover’s small motor, commanding the rover’s robotic arm to rotate the SHERLOC instrument under different orientations with supporting Mastcam-Z imagery, rocking the mechanism back and forth to loosen any debris potentially jamming the lens cover, and even engaging the rover’s percussive drill to try jostling it loose. On March 3, imagery returned from Perseverance showed that the ACI cover had opened more than 180 degrees, clearing the imager’s field of view and enabling the ACI to be placed near its target.

Because the cover could no longer be moved, focusing was no longer possible. They then had to use the robot arm to do a long sequence of careful focus tests to determine the best distance for sharp imagery, which was found to be about 1.58 inches.

As is usual for all Perseverance press releases from NASA, this one starts out with the lie that the purpose of this instrument is to “look for potential signs of ancient microbial life.” That is false. While finding such things would be possible with SHERLOC, its real purpose is to study close-up the geology of Mars. To claim its purpose is to look for microbial life is sheer blarney.

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Chang’e-6 sample return capsule opened in China

10:27 am

According to China’s state-run press, the return capsule carrying samples from the far side of the Moon was opened yesterday “during a ceremony at the China Academy of Space Technology under the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation in Beijing.”

No other details were released. The pictures at the link appear to show engineers removing an internal capsule from inside the return capsule, which makes sense. For many scientific reasons the actual samples must be kept sealed from the Earth’s atmosphere in order to make sure they are not contaminated. The actual lunar material will not be exposed and touched until it is placed inside a very controlled environment.

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Collins officially backs out of contracts to build spacesuits for NASA

10:20 am

According to an announcement today from NASA, Collins Aerospace has now officially backed out of its NASA contracts to build a new spacesuit for both space station and lunar operations in the agency’s Artemis program.

In 2022 and 2023, NASA awarded Collins Aerospace two task orders under the agency’s xEVAS (Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services) contract. The first task order was to deliver a next generation spacesuit and spacewalking system for potential use on the International Space Station with a base value of $97.2 million. The second task order was to advance additional spacesuit capabilities with a base value of $5 million.

After a thorough evaluation, NASA and Collins Aerospace have mutually agreed to descope the existing task orders on the Collins Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services contract. This descope includes ending the International Space Station suit demonstration, which was targeted for 2026. No further work will be performed on the task orders. This action was agreed upon after Collins recognized its development timeline would not support the space station’s schedule and NASA’s mission objectives.

NASA still has a second and similar spacesuit deal with Axiom, which appears to be moving forward as planned. Whether the agency will consider new offers from other companies to replace Collins is not known at this time. It is instead possible NASA will reserve this $102.2 million to use to help Axiom if it runs into problems.

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NASA awards SpaceX $843 million contract to de-orbit ISS

10:14 am

NASA today announced that it has awarded SpaceX a $843 million contract to build a de-orbit spacecraft that can dock to ISS and fire its thrusters so that the station will be safely de-orbited when it is retired in 2030, burning up over the ocean.

While the company will develop the deorbit spacecraft, NASA will take ownership after development and operate it throughout its mission. Along with the space station, it is expected to destructively breakup as part of the re-entry process.

The announcement provided no other details. It is not clear whether the thrusters on a Dragon capsule would be sufficient for this task. Most likely not, which means SpaceX will have to develop something else to do the job. Maybe its bid proposed using a Starship for the task.

It is also not clear whether any modules on ISS will be salvaged for other uses before de-orbit. The modules that the commercial company Axiom plans to attach to ISS in the next year or so are supposed to undock to form its own independent space station sometime later this decade. Will Russia’s modules do the same? And will any other modules?

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Breakup of defunct Russian satellite forces astronauts on ISS to retreat to lifeboat capsules

10:04 am

Because an old and defunct Russian Earth-observation satellite broke up into about 100 pieces as it began falling back to Earth on June 26, 2024, the astronauts on ISS spent an hour or so today sheltering in the three manned capsules (Endeavour, Starliner, and Soyuz) docked to ISS just in case one of those pieces hit the station.

Nothing hit the station, and the astronauts resumed their normal activities.

One wonders it this action was done simply out of normal caution, or if NASA officials did it to show their confidence in using Starliner as a lifeboat and thus help stem some of the bad publicity the agency is getting for the repeated delays in returning Starliner and its crew back to Earth. I don’t know the exact altitude in which that satellite broke up, but such things usually happen when a satellite dips below 100 miles, well below ISS’s present orbit. If so, there was absolutely no danger at all, and the retreat to the capsules was pure show.

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Firefly signs deal to launch its Alpha rocket from Esrange spaceport in Sweden

9:43 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea

Firefly has now signed a deal to launch its Alpha rocket in 2026 from the Esrange spaceport in Sweden, becoming that spaceport’s second orbital customer.

Esrange is not really a new spaceport. It was originally built in the 1960s and was used for decades for suborbital test launches, much like Wallops Island in the U.S. In January 2023 it upgraded one launchpad to allow commercial orbital launches, and in May 2024, signed a launch deal with a new rocket startup from South Korea named Perigee.

This new contract with Firefly is a bigger deal, because Firefly has already launched several times, and is more established.

These developments indicate as well the cost of red tape in the United Kingdom. The map to the right shows the spaceports competing for business in Europe. The two UK spaceports (Saxaford and Sutherland) began construction years before Esrange decided to upgrade, but both are now losing business to Sweden because regulatory delays at the Civil Aviation Authority in the UK has delayed all launches there for years.

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ULA replaces Sierra’s mini-shuttle with dummy payload to launch Vulcan in September

9:28 am

Because of continuing delays in preparing Sierra Space’s Tenacity Dream Chaser mini-shuttle for launch, ULA has been forced to remove it from the second launch of Vulcan in order to proceed with the launch in September as planned.

ULA needs to launch Vulcan for the second time and as soon as possible in order to get approval from the Pentagon to do military launches. The delays in getting Tenacity ready for launch has already impacted that schedule, as ULA had originally hoped to launch Vulcan on its second flight — with Tenacity as the payload — several months ago. Further delays beyond September would seriously damage not only ULA’s bottom line, but the military’s own needs. It is all for these reasons that ULA has now set up a new review team to force this schedule forward, likely under pressure from the Pentagon.

Sierra Space meanwhile says that Tenacity is still on track to be ready to launch before the end of the year, but it is unclear what rocket will carry it. ULA will likely offer another Vulcan rocket for the purpose, but to do so it will probably have to delay some other payload, and it is certain it will not do that to any upcoming military launches. Based on the announced launch schedule, it does not look like this launch can occur on a ULA rocket in 2024. ULA says it hopes to launch at least 20 times in 2025, so one of those launches will likely carry Tenacity.

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SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites, using a first stage for the 22nd time

9:08 am

SpaceX early this morning launched another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral and using a first stage on its record-setting 22nd flight.

That stage successfully landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The flight was so routinely boring for the launch crew that the flight director felt no need to even bother having anyone do a T-10 second countdown at launch.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

68 SpaceX
28 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 79 to 42, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 68 to 53.

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An island of hundreds of scour pits in Mars’ largest volcanic ash field

2:05 pm

An island of scour pits
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the left, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on April 25, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

It shows what the science team labels a “scour pit island,” an area about 13 miles long and 3.5 miles wide where the ground is covered by these pits.

Your eye may play tricks on you, reversing the elevations. These are all pits, with most having a central peak or ridgeline. To help, note that the sunlight is coming from the west. The arrow on the center left of the picture sits on a plateau above these pits.

According to this paper [pdf], the pits are slowly dug out by the wind coming from the southeast blowing to the northwest, as indicated by the arrows. The central peaks or ridges are thought to be a hint of the original topography, with the wind only able to pull ash from the terrain around these peaks.
» Read more

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Arianespace calls for Europe to require all European space payloads use European rockets

9:57 am

Arianespace, whose many-decade-long European launch monopoly is presently threatened by a wave of new rocket startups and an effort by European governments to created a competitive launch industry of many companies, has now urged Europe to require that all European space payloads use European rockets.

Arianespace head of public affairs Charlotte Lang has advocated for legislation that would require European missions to be launched aboard European rockets. Lang made the comments during the “Ensuring Long Term Autonomous Access to Space for Europe” panel on the first day of The European Space Forum conference. “The EU should enforce the principle of European launcher preference,” said Lang.

In a follow-up statement, Arianespace reiterated “the need for the EU to legislate that European missions are launched from European territory using launchers and technology manufactured in Europe by European providers.” The company identified the European Union’s planned IRIS² constellation as the “perfect opportunity to advance this initiative.”

Arianespace is like Blue Origin. It can’t get its rockets built and flying at a competitive price, so instead it advocates lawfare to limit competition in order to give it a favored position when it bids on future launch contracts.

In the case of Europe, I think this Arianespace effort will generally fall on deaf ears. The trend among numerous European governments (Germany, France, Italy) is to encourage new rocket companies to compete with Arianespace, in order to create options. These governments will of course wish to favor these new European rocket companies with any contract awards, but they will also not want to tie their hands with the kind of legislation Arianespace proposes. They all discovered in the past two years what could happen if they do that, when Arianespace failed to get Ariane-6 launched on time, and Europe ended up with no launch capabilities. During that time period they still had the option to use other non-European options (such as SpaceX). Having that flexibility in the future makes great sense.

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Blue Origin to FAA: Limit future SpaceX Starship launches at Cape Canaveral

9:38 am

Blue Origin has once again decided to use lawfare against SpaceX rather than actually build rockets that are competitive. As part of the process by the FAA to do a new Environmental Impact Statement on SpaceX’s plans for Starship/Superheavy launches at Cape Canaveral, Blue Origin last week submitted its own comment asking the FAA to cap the launches of its competitor, citing environment concerns.

The company recommends the following mitigation method for SpaceX’s Starship launches, prior to the company being issued a Vehicle Operator License:

“Capping the rate of Ss-SH launch, landing, and other operations, including but not limited to test firings, transport operations, and fueling, to a number that has a minimal impact on the local environment, locally operating personnel, and the local community, in consideration of all risks and impacts, including but not limited to anomaly risks, air toxin and hazardous materials dispersion, road closures, and heat and noise generation.”

Along with requesting a max number of Starship launches at the site, Blue Origin argues that the government increase launch infrastructure that opens other launchpads to nearby lessees when roads are forced to be closed for SpaceX launches. The filing also notes that SpaceX has already received environmental testing at its Starbase site in Boca Chica, Texas.

You can read Blue Origin’s full comment here [pdf]. Essentially, Blue Origin is attempting to use this new impact statement to have the federal government damage or destroy its competition.

Musk’s response was a two word tweet: “Sue Origin.”

It is very clear that Jeff Bezos’s company is poorly focused. In the last decade it has built almost nothing, while spending a lot of time filing lawsuits against its competition. This action is simply another example.

Worse, Blue Origin’s comment will provide ammunition for the continuing Biden administration lawfare against Musk and SpaceX, making it difficult for the FAA to approve the impact statement as requested by SpaceX. If so, the development and operational use of Starship/Superheavy will be seriously threatened.

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Collins reportedly in the process of canceling its NASA spacesuit contract

9:19 am

As if NASA didn’t have enough spacesuit problems, with a ISS spacewalk this week canceled because one of the NASA-built suits on the station began leaking water again, Collins Aerospace, one of the two companies that won contracts to build new spacesuits, is now in negotiations to end that contract.

But Collins’ role in the program has been bumpy and development has fallen behind schedule, and the company has been in talks with NASA officials on how to wind down its role in the program, the two people said. “After a thorough evaluation, Collins Aerospace and NASA mutually agreed to descope Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) task orders,” a Collins spokeswoman said in a statement, referring to the spacesuit contract.

If this story is confirmed, it means at present only Axiom is building new spacesuits that can either be used on ISS or on future Artemis missions to the Moon and Gateway. Whether NASA will put out the Collins contract for bid again is unknown. In its original cargo capsule contracts early in the 2010s, one company failed to raise sufficient funds to build its capsule, so NASA cancelled it and awarded Orbital Sciences and its Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule the deal.

If the contract is put out for new bidding, SpaceX would be in a very strong position to win, as its own internally financed spacewalk spacesuits are about to get their first flight test on Jared Isaacman’s Polaris Dawn mission on the Resilience Dragon capsule later this summer.

The failure of Collins here is disturbing, and might be an indicator of an overall loss in American engineering capabilities. Once a challenge like this would have posed no problem for any American aerospace company. Now such tasks are increasingly difficult and unachievable.

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French rocket startup wins $16 million grant from French government

9:01 am

The French rocket startup Latitude has been awarded a $16 million grant from French government for development work on its proposed two-stage Zephyr orbital rocket, which is targeting 2025 for its first test launch.

Nor is this grant the only money the company has raised.

In January, Latitude announced that it had closed its Series B funding round, raising $30 million. In March, the company was one of four companies selected to receive a share of €400 million [$427 million] in subsidies from the French government. This funding is, however, only fully unlocked when the company completes its inaugural flight of Zephyr.

Though Latitude has obtained some private investment capital, it appears it is mostly relying on government funds. Under these conditions, it is unclear whether the rocket startup will be able to compete not only with the other new European rocket startups but with the rest of the world. Government funding is usually not well tied with profit or cost efficiency, and thus the company will have less incentive to develop a competitive rocket.

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SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy launches NOAA weather satellite

2:37 pm

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket today successfully launched a NOAA weather satellite, completing its first flight in 2024 and its tenth flight overall.

The two side boosters completed their first flight, with both landing back at Cape Canaveral. The core stage was allowed to fall into the ocean.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

67 SpaceX
28 China
8 Russia
8 Rocket Lab

American private enterprise now leads the world combined in successful launches, 78 to 42, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including other American companies, 67 to 53.

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More garbage science about wildfires and global warming from Nature

12:31 pm

Nature: the science journal that no longer does real science
The science journal which no longer
understands how real science is done

The once highly respected science journal Nature continues its descent into propaganda and bad science, all because it bows unskeptically before the altar of global warming and leftist science fantasies.

Today’s example is an article this week entitled “You’re not imagining it: extreme wildfires are now more common,” describing a new Nature paper that attempted to use satellite data to prove that the intensity of wildfires has increased in the past two decades.

For the current study, published in Nature Ecology and Evolution on 24 June, Cunningham and his colleagues scoured global satellite data for fire activity. They used infrared records to measure the energy intensity of nearly 31 million daily fire events over two decades, focusing on the most extreme ones — roughly 2,900 events. The researchers calculated that there was a 2.2-fold increase in the frequency of extreme events globally in 2003–23, and a 2.3-fold boost in the average intensity of the top 20 most intense fires each year.

We’re all gonna die! As is usual for these crap climate-related studies, the entire goal is to drum up some manufactured new crisis that justifies the claim that the climate is warming. This study is no different, as the article eagerly notes:

Although the study doesn’t directly connect the fire trend to global warming, Cunningham [the study’s lead author] says “there’s almost certainly a significant signal of climate change”. Research has shown that rising temperatures are drying out ecosystems — such as coniferous forests — that are naturally prone to fire. This provides fuel that can boost the fires’ size and longevity. The latest study also found that the energy intensity of the fires increased faster during the night-time over the past two decades than during the daytime, which aligns with evidence4 that rising night-time temperatures are contributing to fire risk.

Not surprisingly, the New York Times immediately jumped on the bandwagon with its own article that accepts the conclusions of this research with utter naivety.

What junk. First, Cunningham fails to note this minor fact mentioned in the abstract of his own paper:
» Read more

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Airbus forced to write off almost a billion dollars

9:42 am

Even though the problems that Boeing has been driving its customers to Airbus, Airbus yesterday revealed that its own business outlook is presently suffering, forcing it to write off $965 million.

Yielding to growing scepticism among suppliers over its plans for jet output, Airbus lowered its widely watched forecast for deliveries this year to around 770 jets from around 800. It also tempered plans to raise output of its best-selling A320neo family, by delaying the date at which it expects to reach a record production speed of 75 jets a month to 2027 from 2026. That compares with an estimated 50 jets a month now.

As a result of the lower delivery forecasts, which imply annual growth of 5% instead of 9%, Airbus lowered its main financial targets for 2024. It now expects underlying operating income of around 5.5 billion euros, instead of a range of 6.5 billion to 7.0 billion, and free cashflow of 3.5 billion instead of 4.0 billion.

The article focuses on Airbus’s engine supply issues that are restricting its ability to build jets. It makes no mention of the company’s joint partnership with Safran to build the Ariane-6 rocket, which has failed to garner the business predicted, even as it is about to make its inaugural launch on July 9th. Though peripheral to the airplane issues described, it is certainly a factor in these financial issues.

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Scientists surprised by new Webb data of the upper layers of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot

9:33 am

Jupiter's Great Red Spot, as seen in infrared
Click for original image.

The uncertainty of science: Using the Webb Space Telescope, scientists have obtained infrared data of the upper layers of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, revealing that it is far more complicated that predicted by researchers.

The upper atmosphere of Jupiter is the interface between the planet’s magnetic field and the underlying atmosphere. Here, the bright and vibrant displays of northern and southern lights can be seen, which are fuelled by the volcanic material ejected from Jupiter’s moon Io. However, closer to the equator, the structure of the planet’s upper atmosphere is influenced by incoming sunlight. Because Jupiter receives only 4% of the sunlight that is received on Earth, astronomers predicted this region to be homogeneous in nature.

The Great Red Spot of Jupiter was observed by Webb’s Near-InfraRed Spectrograph (NIRSpec) in July 2022, using the instrument’s Integral Field Unit capabilities. The team’s Early Release Science observations sought to investigate if this region was in fact dull, and the region above the iconic Great Red Spot was targeted for Webb’s observations. The team was surprised to discover that the upper atmosphere hosts a variety of intricate structures, including dark arcs and bright spots, across the entire field of view.

You can read the published research paper here. The image to the right is figure 4 from that paper, with each panel showing different infrared wavelengths indicated by the different colors, and thus the complex structures and physical properties.

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Firefly to launch from Wallops instead of Cape Canaveral

9:18 am

The rocket startup Firefly announced yesterday that it has decided to change its east coast launch site for its Alpha rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida to Wallops Island in Virginia, using the same pad there that Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket uses.

The company said that it would use Pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS) on Wallops Island for Alpha launches, starting as soon as 2025. The launch pad, built for the Antares rocket, will continue to be used for the revised Antares 330 Northrop Grumman is developing in collaboration with Firefly as well as the larger Medium Launch Vehicle (MLV) the companies are building.

The company says launching from Wallops, in addition to its existing pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, will allow it to serve more customers. Wallops can support launches to lower inclination orbits than feasible from Vandenberg, which is best suited for sun-synchronous and other high-inclination orbits.

Because the revised Antares rocket will use a first stage built by Firefly (replacing a Ukrainian first stage no longer available due to Russia’s invasion), this change appears to make a great deal of sense. The revised pad will likely use comparable systems between both Antares and Alpha.

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Chang’e-6 brings back the first lunar samples from Moon’s far side

9:10 am

Engineers inspecting and opening Chang'e-6 return capsule
Engineers inspecting and opening Chang’e-6’s
sample return capsule after landing today.
Click for original image.

According to China’s state-run press, the sample return capsule of its Chang’e-6 lunar mission successfully landed today in the inner Mongolia region of China, bringing back the first lunar samples from Moon’s far side.

Under ground control, the returner separated from the orbiter approximately 5,000 km above the South Atlantic. The capsule entered the Earth’s atmosphere at about 1:41 p.m. at an altitude of about 120 km and a speed of nearly 11.2 km per second. After aerodynamic deceleration, it skipped out of the atmosphere and then began to glide downwards, before re-entering the atmosphere and decelerating for a second time.
At around 10 km above the ground, a parachute opened, and the returner later landed precisely and smoothly in the predetermined area, where it was recovered by a search team.

The returner is set to be airlifted to Beijing for opening, and the lunar samples will be transferred to a team of scientists for subsequent storage, analysis and study, said the CNSA. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted sentence is important. China has now successfully flown this atmospheric skip maneuver twice on returning from the Moon. Though both missions were unmanned, the technical knowledge gained from these flights is critical for their plans to send astronauts to the Moon in the next few years.

I have embedded China’s broadcast of the landing below. The sample capsule will now be carefully opened and the samples distributed first to Chinese scientists and later to China’s various partners in its lunar base project. The samples themselves came from a small mare region on the edge of Apollo Crater inside South Aitken Basin, one of the largest impact basins on the Moon. It is thus hoped that the samples were excavated from deep within the Moon during the impact, and will provide new data on the Moon’s make-up and history.
» Read more

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Reparations: Taking money from people who never owned slaves and giving it to people who never were slaves

12:48 pm

Harvard: where you get can get a shoddy education centered on hate and bigotry
Harvard: where you can spend a lot of money
getting a shoddy education teaching hate and bigotry

The effort to justify the new fad of forcing all Americans today to pay blacks reparations for the evil of slavery that was eliminated a century and a half ago at the cost of more than 600K lives continues. A recent published study by two “Didn’t Earn It” (DEI) academic elites at the Harvard Kennedy School attempts to justify the distribution of reparations now by claiming that the U.S. has a long history of paying out money to harmed individuals. From the paper’s abstract:

[T]he United States has a long-standing social norm that if an individual or community has suffered a harm, it is considered right for the federal government to provide some measure of what we term “reparatory compensation.” In discussing this norm and its implications for Black American reparations, we first describe the scale, categories, and interlocking and compounding effects of discriminatory harms by introducing a taxonomy of illustrative racial harms from slavery to the present. We then reveal how the social norm, precedent, and federal programs operate to provide victims with reparatory compensation, reviewing federal programs that offer compensation, such as environmental disasters, market failures, and vaccine injuries. We conclude that the government already has the norm, precedent, expertise, and resources to provide reparations to Black Americans. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted word is key to understanding the fundamental intellectual dishonesty of these incompetent Harvard academics. In their paper they use numerous examples of cases where the government has provided compensation to actual individuals — such as veterans, individuals harmed by radiation from nuclear tests, and those who lost their pensions due to bankruptcy or mismanagement of their pension funds — and then claim this proves paying reparations to the community of blacks, based merely on their race and the past existence of slavery, is within traditional American jurisprudence.

This is all a lie. » Read more

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