Swing Ninjas – I Wanna Be Like You
An evening pause: Hat tip Judd Clark.
Category: Behind The Black
May 15, 2024 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- Voyager Space to work with Marshall to develop new airlock concept
The company already has a new design working on ISS. This is to develop something even better.
- France’s The Exploration Company hires Blue Origin’s director of human spaceflight, Mark Kirasich, to head up its US operations
Kirasich had a 40-year career at NASA, so they are possibly hiring him to help grease the wheels with the agency.
- Rocket Lab wants to celebrate its up-coming 50th launch by awarding three launch photographers an all-expenses paid trip to capture it
The launch is presently targeting a June launch.
- The launch of China’s Xuntian Hubble-class optical telescope appears delayed until 2027
This is a two year delay. Once launched the plan is to fly it near China’s space station, so that astronauts can easily go to it to do repairs or upgrades.
- Managers in China propose building its lunar research station in three stages
The first stage would be short-term tech development, the second mid-term expansion and collaboration, and the third long-term leadership in lunar resource utilization.
- OneWeb faces regulatory delays in India
Very puzzling as the company is half owned by an Indian. Jay suggests, “They forgot to pay off someone.”
Why are so many conservatives such downers?
“Frankly, for the Joe Biden campaign these numbers
are an absolute disaster.” Click for full video.
In the past two weeks I have noticed two political trends within the United States, one that seems quite hopeful and another that depresses me to the bottom of my soul.
The hopeful trend has to do with the left and what appears to be a growing collapse of its political support. The pro-Hamas riots on college campuses and elsewhere have not had the impact of the 2020 Antifa and BLM riots, where those disruptions struck fear into ordinary Americans while instilling them with a deep unfounded guilt that paralyzed them into either inaction or endorsing the foolish racist policies of that BLM movement.
In 2024 the pro-Hamas riots are doing the exact opposite. They are antagonizing everyone, and highlighting the racism and violence that is presently very inherent within the modern policies of the Democratic Party. Who wants to support a party whose base justifies and supports the work of terrorist organizations like Hamas, that torture, rape, and murder of innocents, including women, children, and babies?
On top of those ugly riots, Biden’s administration in almost all things has proven to be a disaster. Inflation has been terrible, the economy has doing poorly, the illegal immigration is out-of-control and impacting not just Republican border states but the Democratically-controlled inner ciites. Internationally Biden’s weak and indecisive leadership has led to wars in the Ukraine and Middle East, with tensions rising in many other places.
The result has been disastrous polls for Joe Biden — across the board — suggesting that not only will Donald Trump win the November election, he will do so with such strong numbers it will be impossible for even the worst vote tampering by the Democrats to overthrow that victory. Those polls also suggest that the Republicans will gain a large majority in the Senate, and likely a larger renewed majority in the House.
The disaster that is Joe Biden and the viciousness of the Democratic Party base has become so evident that even some previously knee-jerk Democrats are beginning to admit to it, and are attempting to change it. They don’t seem to be succeeding, but that effort illustrates further these hopeful trendlines. If even Democrats can no longer stand what their party stands for, then there is a good chance we might finally see that party clean up its act, or die and be replaced with something more laudable.
You must then wonder: What trend could possibly exist at this time that could be depressing me to the bottom of my soul?
» Read more
Juno looks down at Jupiter
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, reduced, and annotated to post here, was taken on May 12, 2024 by the camera on the Jupiter orbiter Juno during its most recent close-fly of the gas giant, its sixty-first since it arrived in 2016. The picture was snapped when Juno was about 34,674 miles away from Jupiter as it flew over the northern hemisphere.
Citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulos then took that raw image and enhanced and enlarged it to bring out the storm details. You can see the distinct bands that cut across Jupiter’s equatorial and mid-latitudes. The reddish band is where the Great Red Spot is located, though that spot is not seen in this picture.
As we move north those bands slowly transition into the chaotic storms of the polar regions, which also circle the pole but do not form bands.
For scale I have added a circle that approximates the Earth’s size in comparison to Jupiter. You will notice that some of those polar storms are as big if not bigger than the Earth itself. To think we presently have any real understanding of the processes that create Jupiter’s climate and weather systems is to be arrogant beyond belief.
Fortunately, the scientists who study Jupiter are not that arrogant, though they often can’t admit it and are forced to sound otherwise when ignorant journalists and NASA managers demand more answers from them then are possible. The scientists understand that what makes pictures like this intriguing is not what it tells us but the amount of ignorance it reveals. To get funding for future research however sometimes requires they sound more knowledgeable than they are.
The aurora as seen looking down from space
Click for original image.
NOAA on May 13, 2024 released a set of eight images taken by its fleet of JPSS weather satellites, showing the strong Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights that were activated over the May 11th weekend due to several very strong solar flares on the Sun and sent a geomagnetic storm at the Earth.
One of those images, reduced to post here, is to the right. You can see the eastern coast of the United States, outlined by city lights, with a band of aurora cutting across the northern half and reaching south below the Great Lakes. The other seven images are available at the link above.
The geomagnetic storm was the strongest produced by the Sun in more than two decades, since 2003. That storm occurred during solar maximum, as did the May 11th this past weekend. However, the Sun experienced another solar maximum in-between, in 2014, which produced few such storms, and none as strong.
I want to add that despite the screams of panic prior to the arrival of this storm, its arrival produced only minor disturbances in the world’s electrical grid, and in fact was proof positive that the many decades of work that electrical companies have devoted to protecting the grid from such storms has paid off. It is very unlikely any major storm from the Sun can harm that grid in the future, unless of course we get lazy and stop maintaining it.
FAA schedules first three public meetings for Starship/Superheavy impact statement review
The FAA has now scheduled the first three public meetings as part of its new environmental impact statement review of SpaceX’s proposed construction plans at Cape Canaveral.
The in-person open houses will feature information stations where the FAA will “provide information describing the purpose of the scoping meetings, project schedule, opportunities for public involvement, proposed action and alternatives summary, and environmental resource area summary. Fact sheets will be made available containing similar information,” the project website says.
“At any time during the meetings, the public will have the opportunity to provide verbal comments to a court reporter or written comments via a written comment form at one of several commenting stations,” the website says.
It appears that SpaceX is proposing two different options for establishing an additional launchpad for Superheavy/Starship. Its preferred option is to refurbish pad LC-37, which was most recenly used by ULA to launch its Delta-4 Heavy in April. A second option is to develop a new pad entirely, dubbed LC-50.
Though the FAA claims this new impact statement is necessary because SpaceX has upped the planned annual Superheavy/Starship launches from 24 to 44, that claim is bogus. The difference is not that significant, and more important, rockets have been launching from these pads now for almost three-quarters of a century, and the environment has not only not been harmed by that activity, the wildlife surrounding the cape has prospered tremendously by the creation of a large zone where no development can occur.
That history is the real impact statement, and it proves the new red tape is unecessary. What the FAA (and the Air Force) are now doing is simply lawfare against SpaceX.
André Rieu & the Johann Strauss Orchestra – Seventy-Six Trombones
An evening pause: This video is apropos of Arlo Guthrie’s words about the impact of American music in yesterday’s evening pause. Here a classical orchestra in Austria performs a song from one of Broadway’s greatest musicals, The Music Man, and everyone in the audience knows it.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
May 14, 2024 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also tipped me off to the Starliner and Ispace stories earlier today.
This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.
- Astrobotic touts its fully reusable suborbital rocket, Xogdor, scheduled for first flight in 2025
This is technology developed by Masten Space Systems and bought and absorbed into Astrobotic in 2022.
- ULA’s CEO shows off picture of upper stage for the second Vulcan flight, now being assembled
Launch date is still targeting the fall.
- Raw images from Juno’s 61st close fly-by of Jupiter this past weekend
It will take a week or so for citizen scientists to begin posting processed images that cull the good data from these raw pictures.
- Europe’s second generation Galileo GPS-type satellite design passes design review
The satellite is being built by the European company Thales Alenia.
- The completed hull of Northrop Grumman’s next Cygnus cargo freighter ready to final assembly and launch to ISS
Thales Alenia builds the spacecraft’s basic structure.
- On this day in 1973 the last Saturn-5 launched, carrying the first American space station Skylab
That was more than fifty years ago. Had we harnessed that technology then, Americans would already have viable colonies on the Moon, Mars, and the asteroids.
A database for identifying pro-Hamas anti-Semites
Pro-Hamas protesters threaten blind children.
Click for story.
Two weeks ago I urged the UNC fraternity brothers who stood up to pro-Hamas rioters at their college by protecting Old Glory from desecration to use the half million dollars raised for them for something more worthwhile than a big party.
Why not use these funds instead to create a database that identifies every single one of the Hamas protesters who attempted to take over the UNC campus so that future employees will have a resource when it comes time to hire graduates? Why not then use that UNC database as the starting point for a nationwide database, to identify other Hamas protesters who took over colleges at every other university?
It seems that database already exists, called Canary Mission, which was revealed to me first in this somewhat hostile news article on May 12, 2024 from the Times of Israel, which seems more interested in protecting pro-Hamas rioters from the consequences of their actions than defending Jews and Israel from attack.
The goal of Canary Mission is very straight-forward, and utterly legal. From its About webpage:
» Read more
UN slashes in half its death count of women and children for Gaza
The blunt truth. Courtesy of Doug Ross.
The United Nations on May 8, 2024 very quietly cut in half the number of women and children listed as killed in Gaza during the Israeli operation.
The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its child fatality figure from the Gaza war sharply downward, reporting more than 14,500 deaths on May 6 but then 7,797 on May 8. OCHA also revised downward its figure for women fatalities from more than 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths.
This follows the recognition in April that more than 10,000 casualities on Hamas’ list had no names or identifying information, and were removed. At that same time Hamas’ Gaza Ministry of Health stopped claiming that 70% of those killed were women and children. It apparently realized the lie was no longer working, that even its allies in the UN couldn’t buy it any longer.
In other words, the UN has finally acknowledged that the numbers it was getting from Hamas were bogus and made-up. » Read more
Ispace gets a new payload for its first NASA lunar landing mission
Capitalism in space: The Japanese company Ispace has won a contract with the European company Control Data Systems (CDS) to place CDS’s precise localization instrument on Ispace’s APEX lunar lander, its first NASA mission.
CDS’s technology, which combines precision localization with telecommunications, uses Ultra-Wideband for determining precise positions and was developed specifically for space applications with support from the European Space Agency. The lack of a GPS-like system on the Moon, makes the technology ground-breaking for future applications related to lunar exploration.
The agreement … also represents the first Romanian payload to be delivered to the lunar surface. The technology will be integrated into the APEX 1.0 lunar lander as part of ispace technologies U.S. (ispace-U.S.) Mission 3, currently scheduled for 2026. A lunar rover will transport the CDS equipment on the surface to test the localization technology using an antenna that will remain on the APEX 1.0 lander.
Though Ispace is based in Japan, it has divisions in both the U.S. and Europe, which is allowing it to sign contracts with NASA and companies in both locations.
Atlas-5 launch of Starliner slips to May 21, 2024
While ULA has successfully replaced the valve in the upper stage of the Atlas-5 rocket, the first manned launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has slipped another four days, to May 21, 2024, because a newly discovered helium leak in the capsule’s service module.
Starliner teams are working to resolve a small helium leak detected in the spacecraft’s service module traced to a flange on a single reaction control system thruster. Helium is used in spacecraft thruster systems to allow the thrusters to fire and is not combustible or toxic.
NASA and Boeing are developing spacecraft testing and operational solutions to address the issue. As a part of the testing, Boeing will bring the propulsion system up to flight pressurization just as it does prior to launch, and then allow the helium system to vent naturally to validate existing data and strengthen flight rationale.
The prevous launch scrub was entirely due to the ULA’s rocket, not anything related to Boeing. This delay however is a Boeing issue, and it only reinforces the general uneasiness everyone feels about Boeing’s quality control work.