February 9, 2024 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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Category: Behind The Black
Astoria String Quartet Cover – Blank Space
An evening pause: A very nice instrumental cover of a Taylor Swift song.
Hat tip Alton Blevins.
February 8, 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.
- NASA installs experimental optical antenna for receiving laser communications from space
Located at Goldstone in California, it is being used to prove that NASA’s Deep Space Network can be modified for receiving and sending data from and to planetary probes.
- Scientists propose hidden moon of 155-mile-wide asteroid could be sheparding its rings
The theory is based solely on computer simulations, and thus should be treated with skepticism.
- On this day in 1828 Jules Verne was born
Verne is considered by most to be the first modern science fiction writer.
Posted early because I am off to be a volunteer at this year’s annual Night to Shine event, founded by Tim Tebow.
Pushback: Paypal’s blacklisting causes it to lose significant business
It never pays to antagonize your customers: Paypal announced last week that it is laying off 2,500 workers, a reduction of its work force by about 9%, repeating a similar round of layoffs one year ago.
In other words, the company has shrunk by almost 20% since January 2023. The article notes the following financial issues:
Shares of the payments giant have plunged more than 20% over the past year as earnings faltered and the company lowered its full-year guidance for adjusted operating margin. PayPal named [Chief Executive Officer Alex Chriss] last year to replace Dan Schulman.
PayPal was an early disrupter in the payments industry, but rivals including Apple Inc. and Zelle have since crowded the space, leaving PayPal struggling to keep pace. At least four analysts downgraded the stock this month, citing a range of concerns from rising competition to pressure on profitability.
What the article ignores is the blackballing and censorship by Paypal under the leadership of Dan Schulman that directly antagonized its customer base.
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Status of ULA sale offer, as seen by bankers
Link here. The article outlines the perspective of the banking community to the sale, relative to the three potential known purchasers, Blue Origin, Cerberus, and Textron.
[M]ost contended that a deal should have been finalized years ago, as SpaceX now dominates the global rocket launch market and has grabbed share from ULA’s best customer, the U.S. military. The sticky part of a sale, those bankers said, is the need for new ownership that can both streamline ULA and invest in further innovation.
The price is another sticking point: Bankers suggested ULA’s owners initially sought more than $4 billion for the company, but the consensus of a reasonable winning bid was in the range of $2 billion to $2.5 billion. As one banker emphasized to me, there’s more competition among heavy launch vehicles like Vulcan today than there was a decade ago, and the rocket’s only just getting going now.
First, it appears that Textron has already dropped out. Second, the reason the sale was delayed was solely the fault of Blue Origin, as delays in delivering its BE-4 rocket engine to ULA caused the first launch of the Vulcan rocket to be delayed years. The sale couldn’t happen until that rocket was proven flightworthy.
The analysis between Blue Origin and Cerberus makes it hard picking either as the likely winner. It suggests that while Blue Origin, as a rocket company, might be able to more quickly take advanage of the ULA’s assets, Cerberus would be a better managerial fit, more able to trim the fat and make ULA more competitive. For sure, Blue Origin shows no ability to trim fat or work fast.
The bankers also indicated a dark horse could still appear.
Hat tip to BtB’s stringer Jay.
Axiom commercial manned mission to ISS splashes down safely
The four astronauts on Axiom’s third commercial manned mission to ISS successfully splashed down safely today in the Atlantic off the coast of Florida, with SpaceX recovery crews quickly picking them and the capsule Freedom up from the water.
The crew, made up of three European passengers and one Axiom employee, spent 21 days in space, about 17 on ISS. Axiom sold the tickets, and then purchased the ride from SpaceX and the time on ISS from NASA.
SpaceX denies Russian claim that Starlink terminals sold illegally will work in the Ukraine
Russian media sources have recently claimed that Starlink terminals are being sold illegally to Russians for use in the Ukraine and in Russia near the Ukraine border, where they will supposedly work. SpaceX has now denied that claim.
[A]ccording to a report from Russian media outlet ComNews, vendors have been selling the equipment because it allegedly works near the country’s borders and in Ukraine, including the Russian-occupied regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, along with Crimea.
That’s contrary to the official Starlink map, which shows the internet access restricted in Russian-occupied areas. Still, as evidence, ComNews cites the online pages of several vendors, including one that notes the Starlink dish can be used in the “CBO,” a reference to Russian military operation in Ukraine. Although the Russian military has a ban on using Starlink equipment, some volunteer military troops have been buying it up.
The terminals are supposedly obtained secretly through Dubai. The SpaceX denial on X noted that they would deactivate any unauthorized terminal and that…
Starlink also does not operate in Dubai. Starlink cannot be purchased in Dubai nor does SpaceX ship there. Additionally, Starlink has not authorized any third-party intermediaries, resellers or distributors of any kind to sell Starlink in Dubai.
This story however does raise the long-standing question of how SpaceX can control the use and ownership of its terminals. Once shipped to a legal customer, what is to stop that customer from selling that terminal to anyone who can then ship it and sell it to some third party in a blocked region? SpaceX can probably identify the location of its terminals, and if one is found not to be where it should be, deactivate it. But could smugglers eventually block SpaceX from getting this location data?
Russia completes its first launch of 2024
Russia early today successfully completed its first launch of 2024 by launching a classified military satellite, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its military Plesetsk spaceport in the northeast of Russia.
The launch placed the satellite in a polar orbit. Though this likely means the rocket’s lower stages crashed in very remote areas of the Arctic, either in Russia or over the Arctic Ocean, no word on if they hit the ground near habitable areas.
The 2024 launch race:
11 SpaceX
8 China
2 Iran
1 India
1 ULA
1 Japan
1 Rocket Lab
1 Russia
Herman’s Hermits – Henry the VIII/Mrs. Brown
An evening pause: Performed live 1973 on the Midnight Special. A very fun group from the 1960s that also produced some beautiful songs (such as the second in this set).
Hat tip Judd Clark.
More hiking possibilities on Mars!
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconniassance Orbiter (MRO). Dubbed a “terrain sample” by the science team, this picture was likely chosen not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the camera schedule so as to maintain that camera’s proper temperature.
When the team needs to do this they try to pick interesting targets. In this case the location is the region of many many parallel north-south fissures that extend for more than 800 miles south of the giant but relative flat shield volcano Alba Mons. These fissures are grabens, cracks formed when underground pressure pushed the ground up and caused it to spread and crack.
What attracted me to this picture is the ridgeline. It struck me as a wonderful place to hike. I have even indicated in red the likely route any trail-maker would pick to go from the valley below up onto the ridge, and then along its knifelike edge to the south. The height of the cliff down to the east valley averages about six hundred feet, guaranteeing beautiful scenery the entire length.
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Pushback: Parents of 9-year-old slandered by Deadspin reporter sue
Holden (R) with his father Raul, being interviewed
on television following the slander. Click for video.
Bring a gun to a knife fight: This is follow-up to my story only two days ago about the defamation and slander of 9-year-old Holden Armenta by Deadspin Senior Writer Carron Phillips. Both had falsely accused this innocent child of racism because he attended a game wearing facepaint with the red and black colors of the Kansas City Chiefs, like numerous fans have done for decades. My story was about a GiveSendGo fund-raising campaign still on-going to send Holden to the Super Bowl in Las Vegas this coming weekend to see his team play, in person.
On that same day the boy’s parents filed a lawsuit against Deadspin and its parent company, G/O Media, accusing both of defaming both Holden and themselves, and demanding actual and punitive damages.
You can read the complaint here [pdf]. It is a heart-breaking document to read, especially when it describes the painful consequences to Holden because of Phillips’ vicious and false attack.
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A galaxy with a tail of star-forming clusters
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, reduced and sharpened to post here, was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope as part of a survey of twelve different galaxies that have long tails. In this case, the galaxy is named Arp-Madore 1054-325, and the tail that trails off in the upper left is caused by the gravity of the nearby neighboring galaxy, which I think is the patch of stars just below it. Within it are many star clusters where new stars are forming. From the caption:
A team of astronomers used a combination of new observations and archival data to get ages and masses of tidal tail star clusters. They found that these clusters are very young — only 10 million years old. And they seem to be forming at the same rate along tails stretching for thousands of light-years. “It’s a surprise to see lots of the young objects in the tails. It tells us a lot about cluster formation efficiency,” said lead author Michael Rodruck of Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia.
Before the mergers, the galaxies were rich in dusty clouds of molecular hydrogen that may have simply remained inert. But the clouds got jostled and bumped into each other during the encounters. This compressed the hydrogen to the point where it precipitated a firestorm of star birth.
In some ways this galaxy portends one possible future of the Milky Way, after it collides with the nearby Andromeda galaxy in the far future.