An evening pause: This stellar performance by Glen Campbell’s daughter actually allowed me to hear the words of the song for the first time, and thus I ask, was Lefty Pancho’s killer, or was Lefty Pancho himself? Either way, a beautiful poem performed beautifully.
Hat tip Tom Biggar.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The picture on the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in December 2018 and released earlier this year. It shows a filled fault/fissure in a region dubbed Cereberus Palus, located south of the giant volcano Elysium Mons and to the west of Olympus Mons. This region is also biggest and most extensive sections of the transition zone between Mars’s southern highlands and the northern lowlands. This area however is so far from the lowlands its geology is more likely influenced more by the volcanism that created Elysium Mons to the north.
The overview map to the right illustrates this geography, with the black square indicating the location of this image.
The image itself strengthens my uneducated conclusion. This region of Cereberus Palus is filled with many faults, cracks caused as the terrain was stretched by the rising volcano. In some cases, as shown here, the cracks became filled with lava from below, as indicated by the lighter color of the material in those filled cracks..
What struck me most about this image was the terrain on the picture’s right. Looks exactly like the stucco on the outside of my house. It is as if a plasterer came by before the lava solidified and ran his putty knife over the surface to create the multiple small ridges.
It is worthwhile checking out the full resolution image. The details are especially intriguing.
My very simple rules for commenting on Behind the Black have now been added to the right column (seen at the bottom of the page on mobile devices), placed just above the box listing the last ten comments. The rules are hardly odious:
I welcome all opinions, even those that strongly criticize my commentary.
However, name-calling and obscenities will not be tolerated. First time offenders who are new to the site will be warned. Second time offenders or first time offenders who have been here awhile will be suspended for a week. After that, I will ban you. Period.
I have stated these rules in posts in the past. Now they are permanently displayed at a place where I think all commenters will see them. There will therefore be no excuse for violating them in the future.
The House Armed Services Committee has proposed a streamlined Space Corps operating within the Air Force.
The bipartisan agreement calls for a single four-star general in charge of Space Force, compared with the three four-star generals the administration envisioned. It would also have fewer personnel transferred from other services into the Space Force, Smith said. “The main difference from the administration’s approach is less bureaucracy,” Smith said.
This is largely the same plan the committee endorsed in the House’s version of the 2018 NDAA, he said. The Senate Armed Services Committee, which has endorsed Trump’s plan, rejected Space Corps and the language did not make it into the final bill.
As always in Washington, the battle is between those who want to increase the size, power, and wealth of government, and those who wish to shrink it, while making it more effective (something it has not been for decades). The Democratic House plan appears to be taking the latter approach, while the Republican Senate wants the former.
Note how the partisan politics here are reversed. The Democrats in the House are pushing for smaller and more efficient government, and the Republican Senate is opposed, preferring a big unwieldy and unneeded Space Force instead.
In other words, politicians from both parties are not to be trusted. We need to make them all understand that we are watching, and that they will lose at the polls if they choose to expand this bankrupt government.
As for this House proposal, I am encouraged that the House is still pushing it. Hopefully the Senate will finally get on board.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg yesterday extolled fellow justice Brett Kavanaugh for hiring the most female law clerks of any previous justice.
Ginsburg, in prepared remarks to a conference for judges in New York, noted that while women have made progress towards equal representation among the court’s clerks there are areas where improvements are still needed. “Justice Kavanaugh made history by bringing on board an all-female law clerk crew. Thanks to his selections, the Court has this Term, for the first time ever, more women than men serving as law clerks,” she said, according to remarks released by the court.
During Kavanaugh’s nomination hearing he promised to do this, and has followed through, putting the lie to all the evil slanders the Democrats accused him of during those hearings.
As I wrote on American Greatness in October,
Now is the time to look these bullies in the eyes, and tell them that we will not be intimidated, that we will stand for what we believe, and we will not bow to their smears and slanders and screaming protesters who know nothing of us, care nothing for us, and are increasingly willing to harm us and our children because we reject their oppressive and overbearing demands.
Kavanaugh has done this. And so has Ginsburg now. She is considered a hero by the same leftists that slandered Kavanaugh, and she is now telling those slanderers they were full of bunk. Good for her!
President Trump today announced that an immigration deal has been worked out with Mexico, and that he is indefinitely suspending the tariffs he was going to impose on imports from that country.
A “U.S.-Mexico Joint Declaration” released by the State Department late June 7 outlined the details of the deal, saying the U.S. “will immediately expand the implementation” of a program that returns immigrants who cross the southern border to Mexico while their claims are adjudicated. Mexico will “offer jobs, healthcare and education” to those people, “according to its principles,” the agreement stated.
Mexico has also agreed, it said, to take “unprecedented steps to increase enforcement to curb irregular migration,” including the deployment of the Mexican National Guard throughout the country, starting June 10, especially on its southern border with Guatemala. And Mexico is taking “decisive action to dismantle human smuggling and trafficking organizations as well as their illicit financial and transportation networks,” the State Department said.
The agreement calls for more negotiations over the next ninety days.
We shall see. These kind of government deals never seem to accomplish what they promise, so I therefore remain skeptical Mexico will do much to stem the tide of illegals flowing through their country to the U.S.
Capitalism in space: The White House today released an interim proposal [pdf] that would allow private enterprise on ISS, including allowing American private companies to fly tourists to the station.
A new interim directive from NASA allows private companies to buy time and space on the ISS for producing, marketing, or testing their products. It also allows those companies to use resources on the ISS for commercial purposes, even making use of NASA astronauts’ time and expertise (but not their likeness). If companies want, they can even send their own astronauts to the ISS, starting as early as 2020, but all of these activities come with a hefty price tag.
This fits with the Trump administration’s overall push to shift the American space effort from a NASA “program” to an independent and profitable American space industry.
Will this work? I cannot see how it can’t. At a minimum, it will tell us if there really is a viable market for space tourism and industry on the space station.
For the Russians this is another disaster. They had planned to sell the available seats on their Soyuz, no longer used by NASA astronauts, to tourists. It is very likely that business will shift to the U.S. manned capsules being built by SpaceX and Boeing.
The National Park Service has finally recognized reality and removed or changed its displays at Glacier National Park that as recently September 2018 had said that the glaciers would be gone by either 2020 and 2030.
At the same time, the park service is still clinging, quite bitterly if you ask me, to its religious faith in global warming, even though the glaciers in the park have not been shrinking at all in recent years.
The National Park Service (NPS) quietly removed a visitor center sign saying the glaciers at Glacier National Park would disappear by 2020 due to climate change.
As it turns out, higher-than-average snowfall in recent years upended computer model projections from the early 2000s that NPS based its claim glaciers “will all be gone by the year 2020,” federal officials said.
“Glacier retreat in Glacier National Park speeds up and slows down with fluctuations in the local climate,” the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), which monitors Glacier National Park, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Those signs were based on the observation prior to 2010 that glaciers were shrinking more quickly than a computer model predicted they would,” USGS said. “Subsequently, larger than average snowfall over several winters slowed down that retreat rate and the 2020 date used in the NPS display does not apply anymore.”
NPS updated signs at the St. Mary Visitor Center glacier exhibit over the winter. Sign changes meant the display warning glaciers would all disappear by 2020 now says: “When they completely disappear, however, will depend on how and when we act.” [emphasis mine]
The highlighted text illustrates the political agenda of the park service, something they have no mandate to have.
If you want to see how stupid the signage was, read my report when Diane and I visited Glacier in summer of 2017. As I wrote then,
The park’s sloppiness and political posturing here however does serve to produce one good, though certainly unintended, result. It helps to discredit the National Park Service’s global-warming activism, which hasn’t been based on good science for quite awhile. It will also help to raise the skepticism of ordinary park visitors, who will either notice the contradictions, or laugh at the absurdity of the prediction that the glaciers will vanish only three years hence.
I guess the park service finally got tired of dealing with the ridicule.
Capitalism in space: Virgin Orbit this week filed a lawsuit against the satellite company OneWeb for its cancellation of 35 of 39 launches.
According to a complaint Virgin Orbit filed June 4 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, OneWeb quietly canceled 35 of a planned 39 launches last June, triggering a $70 million termination fee spelled out in the contract. Virgin Orbit says OneWeb still owes $46.32 million. The lawsuit was first reported by Law360.com.
The real significance of this story is the decision of OneWeb to back out of its deal with Virgin Orbit. Richard Branson is an investor in both, which is why I think Virgin Orbit got the contract originally, when they were nowhere close to flying.
The timing of OneWeb’s cancellation in June 2018 is interesting. In July 2018 Virgin Orbit announced that it had received a launch license from the FAA for a flight it hoped to do before the end of the summer. That flight never happened.
So, did OneWeb’s cancellation cause the Virgin Orbit flight schedule to stall, or did OneWeb realize in June 2018 that the schedule was unrealistic, and that it was time to get out?
Either way, the lose of this income is a serious blow for this Branson company, and probably does explain the lack of flights in the past year.
If I was to rank the American smallsat orbital rocket companies at this point, Rocket Lab leads, with Vector and Firefly tied for a distance second. I would also consider EXOS Aerospace up there among the leaders, even though they are not yet building an orbital rocket. Instead, they are flying their reusable SARGE suborbital rocket on commercial flights (the next is scheduled for June 30), and using it as a guide for developing the orbital rocket to follow. Virgin Orbit should be among these leaders, but the lose of this contract and their failure to fly as scheduled makes me want to lower them in the rankings.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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It appears that Trump’s threat to impose escalating tariffs on Mexico if it does not start enforcing its own laws against illegal immigrants is having an effect.
First, Mexico today blocked hundreds of illegals as they attempted to cross from Guatemala into Mexico.
Second, Trump has signaled that if this is true he is now willing to consider delaying the first round of 5% tariffs, set to go into effect on June 10.
Mexico’s action might simply be a Potemkin Village, not be be taken seriously. For anyone, including Trump, to take it seriously will require a lot more enforcement. Regardless, it does appears that the tariff threat might be forcing Mexico to give Trump what he wants.
Update: Mexico today also froze the banking accounts of 26 individuals and organizations its says an investigation has found provided funding for the illegal migrant caravans.
The operation tracked financial movements from October 2018 through current dates in an attempt to determine the sources of funding for the migrant caravans. According to their statement, the UIF identified a group of individuals that made several questionable international financial transactions from the cities of Chiapas and Queretaro during the times that the migrant caravans were moving through those places.
Mexican authorities followed the path of the caravans and the financial operations from Queretaro to the border cities of Tijuana, Nogales, Ciudad Juarez, Ciudad Acuna, Piedras Negras, and Reynosa. Based on that information, Mexican authorities were able to trace the source of the funds to the U.S., England, Cameroon, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, the statement revealed.
Based on the result of the investigation, the UIF moved to freeze the accounts in Mexico of the 26 individuals and entities that are believed to have helped fund the migrant caravans or contributed to human smuggling organizations, the SHCP statement revealed. While authorities did not name the individuals or the entities whose assets they froze, they revealed that they would be filing complaints with Mexico’s Attorney General’s Office for prosecution.
Once again, this is positive news, but until we see some actual prosecutions I suspect that Trump will remain skeptical.
Reason 1,323,563 why I don’t use Google: Google has apparently fired a conservative employee, Mike Wacker, for complaining publicly about company’s leftwing bias, including what that employee called “outrage mobs and witch hunts.”
[Wacker] goes on to explain how leftists at Google weaponize HR complaints in order to shut down opposing viewpoints, chronicling a number of right-leaning statements or comments that were formally reported, prompting action. This included one employee’s defense of author Jordan Peterson’s opposition to government enforcement of pronoun-related language, and another’s criticism of the Women’s March over its anti-Semitism problem and lack of inclusivity toward pro-life women.
Meanwhile, Wacker writes, left-wing employees routinely engage in hateful, incendiary and bullying language with impunity (click through for several examples). Google’s Human Resources department has “completely abandoned any pretense of enforcing any sort of objective and impartial standard,” he warns. Wacker says that as a high-profile Republican at the company, he was a frequent target of HR harassment via frivolous complaints, resulting in formal admonitions, and even an offer of a severance package as an incentive to leave Google.
And now he has been fired.
This follows Youtube’s action, a subsidiary of Google, to block conservative Steven Crowder from making any money on his youtube videos.
As I’ve said before, they’re coming for you next, and that time is not far away.
I should note again that it looks like they are already coming for me, based on the strange ebb and flow of hits my website gets from Facebook. Every time my Facebook traffic starts to grow significantly, indicating increasing interest in my site among Facebook users, the hits suddenly drop to zero, as if someone had noticed and decided to block that interest. This has happened several times, and never in conjunction with any specific post. And the only reason I can come up with is that someone at Facebook did not like the conservative-leaning posts I sometimes put up here, and decided to prevent others from reading them.
Since the very beginning of telescopic astronomy, the Martian poles have fascinated. Their changing sizes as the seasons progressed suggested to the early astronomers that Mars might be similar to Earth. Since the advent of the space age we have learned that no, Mars is not similar to Earth, and that its poles only resemble Earth’s in a very superficial way.
Yet, understanding the geology and seasonal evolution of the Martian poles is critical to understanding the planet itself.
This post will focus on the Martian north pole. The map on the right of the north polar regions is based on many satellite images supplemented by a lot of research by planetary scientists. The black circle in the middle is an area with relatively poor image coverage. The green areas are regions of higher elevation where the bulk of the permanent ice cap is located, surrounded by the blue northern lowlands that cover much of Mars’s northern hemisphere and are thought to have once harbored an intermittent ocean.
Click for full image.
The reddish regions encircling the permanent ice cap are large seas of sand dunes, with Olympia Undae the largest and most sand-dune-packed. The image on the right, posted initially here on March 25, 2016, was taken by Mars Odyssey and shows the endlessness of this dune sea. Olympia Undae, spanning 120 degrees of longitude, is about 700 miles long, making it bigger than the Grand Canyon. As I noted in that post, “Just imagine trying to travel though this area. It is the epitome of a trackless waste. And without some form of GPS system getting lost forever would be incredibly easy.”
The polar cap itself, surrounded by those sand seas, is 600 miles across and a little less than 7,000 feet deep. It is made up of many seasonal layers, like the icecaps on Earth, with the bulk a mixture of water ice and cemented dust and sand. The very top layers, dubbed the residual icecap, is about three to six feet thick made up of frozen water having a volume about half of Greenland’s icecap. While this water could sublimate away, data suggests it is, like the icecaps on Earth, in a steady state, neither gaining or losing volume with each Martian year.
Above the residual icecap of water is the seasonal icecap made up of carbon dioxide. Unlike the other layers, this seasonal cap of dry ice, also less than six feet thick, comes and goes with the seasons. During the Martian summer it is gone, the carbon dioxide having sublimated away into the atmosphere. As the weather chills however that carbon dioxide begins to freeze again, falling as CO2 snow on the surface at the poles to create a thin cap of dry ice extending down to about 60 degrees latitude and covering practically everything seen in the first map above.
These facts suggest that future Martian colonists will have an interest in this region. While harsher than the rest of the planet, the conditions at the poles are not so much different that it will be impossible to work here. And here they will find a ready supply of carbon dioxide to help their plants grow, as well as a ready supply of water, all easily mined and near the surface.
In order to understand how this dry ice cap comes and goes, scientists have been using the high resolution camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to repeatedly monitor some of the same locations in these sand seas to track the seasonal changes. In my routine review of the new images downloaded from MRO in May, I came across more than a dozen such images, all of which had been requested by Dr. Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and taken just as the Martian winter was ending and spring was beginning. As she explained to me, “The images I’m requesting now follow-up on many of our earlier study sites so that we can study interannual variability. We’re also looking at more places to get a sense of what is similar/different depending on where you are.”
Below are two of these recent images, showing one example of the springtime changes that can be seen on these dunes.
» Read more
The Ebola epidemic in Africa has continued to grow in the past year, with indications that it is accelerating.
The number of Ebola cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has doubled in just over two months and has now passed 2,000, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
An estimated 2,008 people have been infected with Ebola in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces since the start of the outbreak in late July 2018, and 1,346 of those individuals have died. The numbers represent a rapid escalation of the crisis since the outbreak passed the 1,000-case mark on 24 March (see ‘Escalating crisis’).
Part of the cause for the disease’s spread is political tensions. The Congo government and the people in North Kivu have been in conflict:
Violence has plagued North Kivu for decades, and the region is home to dozens of armed groups and communities who oppose the government. Political tensions grew late last year during elections, when the [Congo’s] former president banned more than a million people in North Kivu from voting because of Ebola. The measure led many people to suspect that the outbreak was a political invention to marginalize the opposition, and not a real disease.
But authorities cannot tackle Ebola if people mistrust their intentions. Health workers must convince people to send their family members to treatment centres, for instance, and persuade people to receive an experimental Ebola vaccine. Despite continuous outreach, many people remain suspicious of Ebola responders — who are often not from the region — and a small fraction assault health workers.
If things don’t change, none of this will end well, for anyone.
Capitalism in space: Worldview has successfully completed a sixteen day flight of its Stratollite high altitude balloon.
The map on the right is from their press release [pdf]. From the first link above:
During the 16-day flight, World View was able to spend up to eight days total in an area about 75 miles wide. It also demonstrated more precise station-keeping, says Hartman, by spending 55 straight hours in a region 62 miles wide and also 6.5 hours in an area a little less than 6 miles wide.
Staying within such a small area is crucial for the Stratollite system, as that capability could be useful for a number of different applications for customers, according to Hartman. He notes that such a system above Earth could be used by the military to aid certain missions operations, or the Stratollite could help monitor natural disasters like tornadoes and hurricanes, and help with disaster relief. “There’s just all kinds of very important use cases when we can provide a station keeping capability in an area as small as a [6-mile] diameter area,” says Hartman.
Throughout this flight, the Stratollite covered a distance of 3,000 miles, making its way to the Grand Canyon, Nevada, Oregon, and Utah. Once the World View team decided to bring the Stratollite back down to Earth, the company was able to land it within 400 feet of a targeted area in the Nevada desert where the vehicle was then recovered. World View even hopes to fly some of the components from this flight on an upcoming mission.
The company’s goal these days is not space tourism, but ground observations, and this flight is certainly a solid proof that they are getting close to achieving that goal.
Link here. The study is detailed, thoughtful, and strongly reiterates the same policy recommendations I put forth in Capitalism in Space.
The paper outlines what the authors think the government should do over the next decade-plus to encourage the take-over of the American space effort by private enterprise. While much of this makes sense, when they get into outlining the specific projects that they want to happen in the 2020s it comes the stuff of fantasy, what the authors wish would happen.
If the government transitions away from a “space program” and instead creates a chaotic and free space industry, it will then be impossible to lay out a specific step-by-step “program” of achievement. Instead, the engine of freedom will take over, and what it will generate can never be predicted, except that it will be vigorous, surprising, and successful, doing things quickly and with exuberance.
That should be the fundamental goal of our government.
An evening pause: My gosh, I didn’t know she could sing! From the Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical of Sunset Boulevard.
Hat tip Danae.
Link here. The article gives a nice summary of what we presently know about Venus, as well as outlining the various proposed missions to it.
First off the starting line, and as far as I know the only mission actually approved, is an orbiter from India, scheduled for launch in 2023. After this are a number of proposals in the U.S. Europe, and Russia.
It appears that the discovery of many exoplanets with features somewhat similar to Venus is one of the factors generating the new interest in going back there.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has approved the preliminary design reviews for its reusable mini-shuttle, dubbed Space Rider, that they hope to launch by 2022.
Launched on Vega-C, Space Rider will serve as an uncrewed high-tech space laboratory operating for periods longer than two months in low orbit. It will then re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and land, returning its valuable payload to eager engineers and scientists at the landing site. After minimal refurbishment it will be ready for its next mission with new payloads and a new mission.
Essentially this is Europe’s X-37B, but developed for commercial customers rather than the military. In fact, it suggests that Boeing, the builder of X-37B, is missing a major market by not developing its own commercial X-37B.
Click for full image.
Cool image from OSIRIS-REx. The picture on the right, cropped to post here, was taken by OSIRIS-REx and shows a square boulder about the size of a 15-passenger van, precariously perched on the rim of a large crater on the asteroid Bennu. The picture was taken April 11 from about 2.9 miles distance.
This scale is human-sized. If that rock is a 15 passenger van, then the small rocks around it are about the size of a person and that cliff is about 20-30 feet high. I can imagine strolling down the slope to check out the cliff face, though I would make sure I gave a wide berth to the part of the cliff directly below that boulder.
An industry advisory panel has expressed strong objections to the proposed new regulations for commercial remote sensing that were intended to streamline the space bureaucracy.
The proposed rule is intended to streamline how such systems are licensed by NOAA as the volume of license applications the office receives increases. However, many [advisory council] members argued that proposal missed the mark and could create new burdens for companies. “I find, at the moment, that the draft rule is wanting across the board, and it’s not close,” said Gil Klinger, chair of [the advisory council] and a Raytheon vice president who spent most of his career at the Defense Department and the intelligence community.
It appears that the government’s proposed revisions don’t accomplish much, and in fact might make things worse.
Link here. It appears InSight’s camera cannot see the hammer drill, called “the mole,” that pushes the heat probe down, and to get a look and assess the problem they are going to use InSight’s robot arm to remove the equipment in the way.
The lifting sequence will begin in late June, with the arm grasping the support structure (InSight conducted some test movements recently). Over the course of a week, the arm will lift the structure in three steps, taking images and returning them so that engineers can make sure the mole isn’t being pulled out of the ground while the structure is moved. If removed from the soil, the mole can’t go back in.
They also have a theory as to what has stopped the drilling.
Team members now believe the most likely cause is an unexpected lack of friction in the soil around InSight – something very different from soil seen on other parts of Mars. The mole is designed so that loose soil flows around it, adding friction that works against its recoil, allowing it to dig. Without enough friction, it will bounce in place.
They can’t see it, as designed? It depends on the soil for friction? I am very puzzled at these design decisions.
The new colonial movement: China today successfully completed its first launch from ocean launchpad, placing seven satellites in orbit with its Long March 11 rocket.
I have embedded a short video of the launch below the fold. It appears they have adapted submarine ICBM engineering for this ocean launch. The rocket is propelled upward from the launchpad before its first stage engines fire.
The rocket:
The Long March-11 (Chang Zheng-11) is a small solid-fueled quick-reaction launch vehicle developed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) with the goal to provide an easy to operate quick-reaction launch vehicle, that can remain in storage for long period and to provide a reliable launch on short notice.
The leaders in the 2019 launch race:
8 China
6 SpaceX
5 Russia
4 Europe (Arianespace)
3 India
The U.S. leads China in the national rankings, 11 to 8.
» Read more
In the piece, Trump’s Promising New Space Plan Won’t Work Without Cutting The Pork, I take a close look at Trump’s Moon plan and actually come away somewhat encouraged.
For one, it is pretty clear that Gateway has been dumped, or at least deemphasized significantly. Second, the plan shifts the focus from NASA being the builder of the program to NASA being a customer of the private sector.
Read it all. There’s a lot more.
They’re coming for you next: A Jewish conservative college student has been forced to change her name and go into hiding after she publicly admitted at a feminist event that she had voted for Trump.
“I was forced almost immediately to go undercover. I was receiving multiple hateful comments and messages a day. I felt I had to do that to keep my family safe so they wouldn’t be targets of online hate,” Tikva told PJ Media. “The worst part is one of the panelists, Deja Foxx, told her Instagram followers where I went to college and, due to her careless actions, students at my school found out my class schedule,” alleged Tikva.
Deja Foxx, who has about 30k followers across Twitter and Instagram, did not respond to numerous inquiries by email, Facebook, and Twitter to comment.
“Then, after Deja doxxed me, I received a number of threats online and in person. Many of them wishing that I would kill myself, would die, I got rape threats, death threats, and many comments were attacking me based on my looks,” Tikva told PJ Media. “I was afraid to even be on campus after that,” she added.
This is today’s left. You are not allowed your place in the marketplace of ideas if you dare take any position they oppose. You will be silenced.
The astronomical community is now calling for new regulations to restrict the number of satellites that can be launched as part of the coming wave of new commercial constellations due to a fear these satellites will interfere with their observations.
Not surprising to me, it is the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that is taking the lead here.
The IAU statement urges satellite designers and policymakers to take a closer look at the potential impacts of satellite constellations on astronomy and how to mitigate them.
“We also urge appropriate agencies to devise a regulatory framework to mitigate or eliminate the detrimental impacts on scientific exploration as soon as practical,” the statement says. “We strongly recommend that all stakeholders in this new and largely unregulated frontier of space utilisation work collaboratively to their mutual advantage.”
When it comes to naming objects in space, the IAU likes to tell everyone else what to do. That top-down approach is now reflected in its demand that these commercial enterprises, with the potential to increase the wealth and knowledge of every human on Earth, be shut down.
The astronomy community has a solution, one that it has been avoiding since they launched Hubble in 1990, and that is to build more space-telescopes. Such telescopes would not only leap-frog the commercial constellations, it would routinely get them better results, far better than anything they get on Earth.
But no, they’d rather squelch the efforts of everyone else so they can maintain the status quo. They should be ashamed.
