A evening pause: This song seems fitting on this, the anniversary of the day Neil Armstrong took the first human step on the Moon. The song however honors Mike Collins, who remained in orbit on Columbia, never to touch the surface of the Moon itself.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who is more awake than I on this Friday afternoon.
The plan is to have this facility pumping out satellites for launch by early 2025. This will give Amazon less than two years to get 1,600 satellites in orbit, as required by its FCC licence.
The link downloads the pdf. Lots of empty blather, but the side-to-side comparison of SpaceX’s Starship with Blue Origin’s Blue Moon is quite educational.
The rocket is carrying a radar Earth observation satellite and six smallsat second payloads
Examples of the bigoted educational material
being pushed by Coca-Cola
Here’s some good news to brighten your weekend: The corporate fad that became a steamroller after the death of George Floyd in 2020 to impose discriminatory racial quotas in hiring — all favoring minorities — now appears to be fading very quickly.
New analysis from employment data provider Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers have been more vulnerable to layoffs than their human resources counterparts, experiencing 40% higher turnover. Their job searches are also taking longer.
…The number of [Chief Diversity Officer] searches is down 75% in the past year, says Jason Hanold, chief executive of Hanold Associates Executive Search, which works with Fortune 100 companies to recruit HR and DEI executives, among other roles.
The DEI movement not only demanded that companies hire more minorities, solely because of their race, it also tried to impose the anti-white hatred of critical race theory on all employees, as shown by the powerpoint presentations above that Coca-Cola foisted on its employees back in 2021. Since then the bad press as well as the crushing loss of customers who were offended deeply by these policies (think Bud Light, Gillette, and Target) has apparently hit home with corporate management.
The fight is not over however. Be warned that the leftists running this movement still have gigantic financial and political resources. One need only look to events in Congress yesterday, where Democrats at a hearing focused on the evils of censorship attempted to censor Robert Kennedy — who also happens to be a Democrat running against Joe Biden for president.
These thugs are still in power, and are getting increasingly brazen in how they abuse that power. If Americans let up their guard at this moment these thugs will move in fast to reimpose and even increase their power.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 25, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The scientists describe these cones as “longitudinally aligned cones,” but this is puzzling since the alignment runs from the northwest to the south east, not north-south along the longitude.
No matter. The alignment is in itself the mystery, especially because the full image shows many more strings of cones in this area, all running from the northwest to the southeast. The strings also are all curved in the same way, sagging to the southwest as if expressing a wave flowing in that direction.
What could create these strings of cones? The overview map below gives us a hint.
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According to India’s space agency ISRO, engineers have successfully completed the fourth of about six engine burns designed to raise Chandrayaan-3’s Earth orbit in preparation for sending it on its path to the Moon.
As shown in the graphic to the right, these adjustments are relatively small, but each increases the speed of the spacecraft at its orbit’s closest point to the Earth. That extra velocity thus reduces the amount of fuel needed for that trans-lunar-injection burn.
If all the maneuvers continue to go as planned, the landing attempt will occur around August 23, 2023.
Using simulated lunar soil, South Korean researchers have developed the engineering that turns that soil into building blocks shaped as needed.
The researchers first produce simulated moon soil by grinding black volcanic rock from Cheorwon County bordering the North. They then use a microwave to turn the sand-like simulant into solidified blocks. Lee said the team has developed a technique to make blocks by heating the soil in a mold to more than 1,000 degrees Celsius in two to three hours and cooling them. In space, the process could be powered by nuclear energy.
The article at the link also provides a nice summary of the status of South Korea’s entire space effort.
Archeologists have discovered a Viking “ritual cremation cemetery” about 4,000 years old near the launch site at the new Saxavord spaceport in Scotland.
The burnt bones were found inside an arc of large granite boulders set into pits in the ground. A small platform of white quartz pebbles was also discovered which may have once been linked to a burial. Quartz is often associated with burial tombs in the prehistoric, and covered the entire outside wall of Newgrange in Ireland.
Test launches at Saxavord are expected to begin in the fall, with the first orbital launch next year. This schedule of course assumes launch licenses can be obtained from the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority.
An evening pause: Another example of how engineering enhances the way we live.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, helps make sure nothing gets missed.
Just remember, Americans made it point to “come in peace for all mankind.”
No launch date revealed, and in fact, few hard details. This is PR. Jay has doubts it will ever launch, and I tend to agree.
For some reason the tweet includes a picture of cars parked near the rocket, as if it is also a car commercial. Jay also adds this interesting drone photo of the launch, taken from above.
The politics at NASA and in Congress make funding this project difficult, if not impossible. As Jay notes, “They are gun shy politically on this subject. How many times have they started a ‘NERVA Study’ and just moved the money over to another project?”
Stanford’s former administrator Tirien Steinbach:
gone because she was in favor of censorship and
mob rule
Bring a gun to a knife fight: It appears that common sense and civilized behavior at Stanford Law School is finally being considered as the only proper behavior for the future and present lawyers that school is supposed to be training.
This story begins on March 9, 2023, when a mob of students and faculty at Stanford, led by Tirien Steinbach, the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion dean, shouted down U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan when he tried to give a lecture about the law for the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society.
At the time the school’s response was weak and inconsistent. Though it sent a letter of apology to Duncan, it also equivocated about punishing anyone who had misbehaved. No students were expelled or suspended, and Steinbach was simply put on leave, even as university officials attempted to portray her as the victim. As I wrote then:
[Law School Dean] Martinez still appeared sympathetic to Steinbach, expressing “..concern over the hateful and threatening messages [Steinbach] has received as a result of viral online and media attention.”
Now, four months later Martinez has finally announced that Steinbach is resigning her post, though even now Martinez appeared regretful that this resignation was necessary.
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Click for interactive global mosaic.
Cool image time! The picture to the right was created from a global mosaic of all the context camera images taken by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) since it entered Mars orbit in 2006. It shows an unnamed 17-mile-wide-depression located only about seven miles south of the southern rim of Valles Marineris.
I highlight this particular depression because, despite seventeen years in orbit, MRO’s high resolution camera has at this time still not taken any pictures inside or around it. This is a place on Mars that remains unstudied in detail, in any way, even though its depth is comparable to the Grand Canyon and its features strongly suggest its is a collapse feature, created when the roof over an underground void gave way. If so, it suggests an origin for Valles Marineris that conflicts with present theories.
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China’s Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueled smallsat rocket today successfully launched what the state-run press said were four weather satellites “belonging to the Tianmu-1 meteorological constellation.”
The launch was from China’s Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China, so the rocket’s lower stages crashed somewhere inside China. No word on where or if they landed near habitable areas.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
48 SpaceX
27 China
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India
American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 55 to 27, and the entire world combined 55 to 46, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 46.
Click for original image.
Using the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have photographed several dozen boulders that were flung off of the asteroid Dimorphos following the impact by the space probe DART. The picture to the right, reduced and brightened to more clearly show those boulders, was taken on December 19, 2022, four months after DART’s impact.
These are among the faintest objects Hubble has ever photographed inside the Solar System. The ejected boulders range in size from 1 meter to 6.7 meters across, based on Hubble photometry. They are drifting away from the asteroid at around a kilometre per hour.
The blue streak is the dust tail that has streamed off of Dimorphos since the impact, pushed away from the sun by the solar wind.
The Trojan debris clouds around PDS 70, as seen by ALMA
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have detected evidence that suggests the possibility of more than one exoplanet sharing the same orbit around PDS 70, a star 400 light years away.
This young star is known to host two giant, Jupiter-like planets, PDS 70b and PDS 70c. By analysing archival ALMA observations of this system, the team spotted a cloud of debris at the location in PDS 70b’s orbit where Trojans are expected to exist.
Trojans occupy the so-called Lagrangian zones, two extended regions in a planet’s orbit where the combined gravitational pull of the star and the planet can trap material. Studying these two regions of PDS 70b’s orbit, astronomers detected a faint signal from one of them, indicating that a cloud of debris with a mass up to roughly two times that of our Moon might reside there.
The press release — as well as most news reports — touts the possibility that they have found a second planet in this orbit. They have not, and are likely not going to. As noted above, the data indicates the presence of “a cloud of debris”, which is most likely a clustering of Trojan asteroids, just as the more than 12,000 asteroids we see in the two Trojan points in Jupiter’s orbit.
Nonetheless, this is the first detection of what appears to be a Trojan clustering in the accretion disk of a young star.
Capitalism in space: NOAA today awarded the smallsat company PlanetiQ a $60 million contract to provide the agency weather data from the company’s planned constellation of 20 satellites.
At present two satellites are in orbit, with more scheduled for launch in 2024. The satellites use data obtained in orbit from the different GPS-type satellite constellations to determine the atmosphere’s temperature, pressure, humidity and electron density.
In 2018 NOAA had awarded PlanetiQ and two other commercial companies, Spire and GeoOptics, small developmental contracts. This appears to be the first full contract, and continues NOAA’s very slow shift from building its own weather satellites to buying data from commercial satellites built by private companies. The agency has resisted this change, but since it can’t get its own satellites built and launched on budget or on time, it is increasingly being forced to do so.
According to government officials, SpaceX has now been given a license to provide Starlink internet service to customers within Malaysia, with particular focus in remote areas that presently do not have service.
The deal apparently requires SpaceX to provide Starlink service to Malaysian schools and educational institutions.
India’s space agency ISRO revealed today that it has successfully completed the second phase of static fire engine tests of the complete propulsion system to be used by the service module of its Gaganyaan’s manned space capsule.
The first hot test of the Phase-2 test series demonstrated the integrated performance of the Gaganyaan Service Module Propulsion System. The test, conducted for a duration of 250 seconds, involved LAM engines firing in continuous mode, along with RCS thrusters, adhering to the test profile.
As part of the Phase-1 test series of SM SDM, ISRO had previously conducted five hot tests, totalling a duration of 2750 seconds. The earlier phase involved five 440 N LAM engines and eight 100 N RCS thrusters. For the Phase-2 test series, the current configuration includes the full configuration of five 440 N LAM engines and sixteen 100 N RCS thrusters.
ISRO had been hoping to launch the first manned mission in ’24, but that target date remains very uncertain.
The uncertainty of science: Using archival data, scientists have discovered a previously undetected but very strange slowly pulsing object that has been doing so since 1988.
Astronomers have found an ultra-slow, long-lasting source of radio-wave pulses, and they are perplexed as to its true nature. While “regular” radio pulsars have very short periods, from seconds down to just a few milliseconds, this source emits a brief pulse of radio waves about three times per hour. What’s more, it has been doing this for decades. “I do not think we can say yet what this object is,” says Victoria Kaspi (McGill University), a pulsar researcher who was not involved in the new study.
Natasha Hurley-Walker (Curtin University, Australia) and her colleagues discovered the mysterious source in data from the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) observatory in Western Australia. They carried out follow-up observations with the MWA and with other radio observatories in Australia and South Africa. Known as GPM J1839-10, the tardy blinker is located at a distance of some 18,500 light-years away in the constellation Scutum. Archival data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Indian Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope reveal that it has been pulsating at least since 1988, with a period of just under 22 minutes (1,318.1957 seconds, to be precise).
In a sense, the object is a pulsar, since on a very basic level it does what all pulsars do, send a radio beat in our direction in a precise pattern. The problem is that according to present theories that say pulsars are actually magnetized neutron stars rotating quickly, this object is rotating too slowly to be one.
SpaceX tonight successfully launched fifteen more Starlink satellites into orbit, lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its tenth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Pacific. Both fairings successfully completed their sixth flight.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
48 SpaceX
26 China (with a launch also planned for tonight)
9 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 India
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 55 to 26, and the entire world combined 55 to 45, with SpaceX by itself leading the entire world combined (excluding other American companies) 48 to 45.
An additional note: This was the 100th successful orbital launch in 2023. In the history of space rocketry, reaching 100 launches in a year was generally considered an indication of an active launch year. Now the global rocket industry accomplishes it in just over half the year. Last year set a record with 179 launches. There is now an outside chance of breaking that, topping 200 launches in 2023.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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