I should have posted this earlier, but I am acting as a quickly scheduled emergency guest for Coast to Coast with Connie Willis tonight, from 10 to 11 pm (Pacific). Should be fun.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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For the second time this week, a Chinese “private” company successfully completed a suborbital rocket test.
This time the launch was by OneSpace, which should not be confused with the other company, iSpace. As with iSpace, the rocket used was a solid rocket, which once again makes me think it is doing work for the Chinese military, and is therefore not as independent or as private as Americans normally consider private companies.
Moreover, the launch was filmed by one of China’s spy satellites, also suggesting the military’s interest in this rocket company’s development. You can see both a ground-based and that satellite’s view of the launch at the link.
When Japan launches its unmanned freighter to ISS on September 10, it will carry a two-cubesat engineering test of some of the concepts required to build a space elevator.
In the experiment, which will be the first of its kind in space, two ultrasmall cubic satellites, or “cubesats,” will be released into space from the station. They will be connected by a steel cable, where a small container — acting like an elevator car — will move along the cable using its own motor. A camera attached to the satellites will record the movements of the container in space, according to the Japanese newspaper The Mainichi.
Each cubesat measures just under 4 inches (10 centimeters) on each side. The cubesats will be connected by a 33-foot-long (10 meters) steel cable for the “elevator car” to move along, according to the report.
I wonder if this experiment will also test some of the technology needed for generating electricity using a tether. Over the decades there have been a number of experimental attempts in space of this concept, all of which have failed for a variety of reasons, all unrelated to the concept itself.
An evening pause: In watching this passionate 1999 performance of this anti-war song, I couldn’t help thinking that the only zombies present were the audience and the singers, locked into simplistic 1960s messages without thought. Nonetheless, it is a great performance and song.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
The filmmakers for the Neil Armstrong biography film, First Man, made a conscious decision to hide or obscure the American flag in certain situations.
This new information has been provided to me by a Washington consultant who, because of his own outrage over their decision to not show the planting of the American flag during the lunar landing, had been given the opportunity to see selected clips from the movie as well as ask questions to the production team.
According to that meeting, he learned that they had consciously made the decision to either reposition or remove American flags from the blue flight suits that the astronauts wore from day to day so that it would not be visible. The image on the right, from the movie, illustrates this, as the American flag was almost always sewn into the upper left shoulder of these suits.
The filmmakers also purposely repositioned the flag or filmed angles for many scenes that acted to obscure the flag on the astronauts’ white pressure suits.
The reasons the filmmakers gave for doing this was to enhance their foreign ticket sales.
To this I say, baloney. They might have had this financial excuse, but I think this holds little or no weight. By willingly admitting that they hid the flag in this petty way they have confirmed their political agenda, their desire to convince the world that this mission was not an American achievement but a “human achievement.” Both the film’s Canadian star as well as its director have made it clear they have a globalist vision of the Apollo program, and wanted to spread the credit of its achievement to all humanity. Consciously hiding the flag in this small-minded manner demonstrates their political motives.
Moreover, even though the director, Damien Chazelle, might have wanted to focus on “Neil Armstrong’s personal saga and what he may have been thinking and feeling during those famous few hours,” removing or obscuring icons of the United States serves no purpose other than to remove the United States from this decidedly American moment. Showing the flag on the flightsuits and pressure suits does not make this a jingoistic pro-American propaganda film. Nor does it do anything to prevent Chazelle from telling Neil Armstrong’s personal story. In fact, if anything, hiding the flag detracts from that goal, as Armstrong was very much doing this for his country (as numerous people who knew him have said), and to de-emphasize that reality is to rewrite history in a very dishonest way.
The pettiness of this entire action further outrages me. There is no doubt that sales would not have suffered in foreign countries, in the slightest, had the American flag been left where it belonged on these suits, and had been shown appropriately in other scenes. It accomplishes nothing positive for the film. What it does do is tell us what these Hollywood “artists” think of America.
So that there is no misunderstanding, I must add that neither my source nor I have as yet seen the entire film. It is still possible that these criticisms are unfair, and that the filmmakers might have shown the American flag appropriately in other scenes, and might even have shown it prominently.
Nonetheless, what we now know is that these filmmakers did made a conscious effort to rewrite history so that the United States no longer appeared as prominent in these events as it should have. Once again, it appears to me that these Hollywood filmmakers did this to express their disdain, almost hatred, of the United States and all that it stands for.
For this fact alone I think Americans should reconsider spending any of their hard-earned money on seeing this propaganda piece.
New data from Juno has revealed that Jupiter’s magnetic field acts like it has three poles, one at each pole and another near the equator.
If Earth’s magnetic field resembles that of a bar magnet, Jupiter’s field looks like someone took a bar magnet, bent it in half and splayed it at both ends. The field emerges in a broad swath across Jupiter’s northern hemisphere and re-enters the planet both around the south pole and in a concentrated spot just south of the equator, researchers report in the Sept. 6 Nature.
“We were baffled” at the finding, says study coauthor Kimberly Moore, a graduate student at Harvard University.
They think the multiple poles are a result of the complexity of Jupiter’s inner core, which likely does not have the same kind of organization as a rocky terrestrial planet.
The new colonial movement: India has signed a cooperative deal with France to provide them help in preparing for its first manned mission in 2022, now dubbed Gaganyaan by India’s press.
Following the signing of agreements between the two parties on Thursday, the agencies “will be combining their expertise in the fields of space medicine, astronaut health monitoring, life support, radiation protection, space debris protection and personal hygiene systems.”
The announcement was made by CNES [France’s space agency] president Jean-Yves Le Gall during the inaugural of Bengaluru Space Expo-2018 where he was the chief guest. It is being organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry along with ISRO and Antrix, the agency’s commercial arm, from September 6 to 8.
The two countries will also work together on other space research.
The science team for Hayabusa-2 has released an updated landing schedule.
Two of the landers developed by the Japanese space agency will be deployed together by Hayabusa 2 on Sept. 21, and another landing probe provided by German and French scientists is set for its descent to Ryugu on Oct. 3.
Those landing attempts will be preceded by a landing rehearsal using the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to approach within 100 feet (30 meters) of Ryugu next week. The spacecraft is scheduled to reach its closest point to the asteroid Sept. 12, low enough to fire and test its laser range finder, a navigation sensor to be used on future touch-and-go maneuvers to snag a sample of Ryugu for return to Earth.
Below is the very busy planetary probe schedule through January:
During this time period Curiosity will also make two more drill attempts, and then resume its climb up Mount Sharp.
The uncertainty of science: A review of the data has caused astronomers to retract a prediction that the two stars in a binary system were going to merge in 2022.
It appears that the mistaken prediction occurred because of a typo in the dataset they were using. The new analysis pinpointed this, which once corrected showed that no star merger is going to take place.
The science team for the U.S.’s exoplanet space telescope TESS this week released its first batch of exoplanet candidates.
TESS scientists released the list so that other astronomers could make an initial determination as to whether these candidates are planets. There are 73 objects in this first batch, including some planets previously known from ground-based searches, says George Ricker, the mission’s principal investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Perhaps 5 to 20% of the objects on the list will turn out to be false alarms, he says. Others, if confirmed, will join the ranks of newly discovered exoplanets.
Researchers expect TESS to find as many as 10,000 large planets. But its main goal is to discover and measure the masses of at least 50 small worlds no more than four times the size of Earth.
Meanwhile, Kepler has resumed operations despite being almost out of fuel. The science team there is attempting to squeeze every last ounce of data it can before the spacecraft’s fuel runs out.
Russia has begun the construction of the first Angara launchpad at their new Vostochny spaceport.
According to earlier reports, the Angara launch pad is to be completed by December 31, 2022. Construction costs are estimated at nearly 39 billion rubles ($565 million).
Somehow it seems to me that this construction is too expensive and is taking too long. A launchpad is essentially a specialized building on the surface. I don’t see why it should be so difficult or expensive to do.
China today launched the third satellite in a constellation of ocean-observing satellites, using its Long March 2C rocket.
Though this is the same rocket that dropped its upper stage near a Chinese town in June, the launch came from the Taiyuan launch site, not the Xichang launchsite used in June, so it is unclear if the upper stages fell near populated areas. I would expect so, however, since Taiyuan is located in the middle of China even closer to populated areas than Xichang, as shown on the map to the right.
If the launch went north from Taiyuan, then those upper stages probably landed in Mongolia. I wonder if China has worked out an agreement with that country about dropping toxic first stages onto its territory.
Regardless, in the 2018 launch standings, China now leads the U.S. 24-22. The leaders in the race, with the leading U.S. companies broken out, are as follows:
24 China
15 SpaceX
8 Russia
6 ULA
5 Europe
As mentioned previously, with every launch for the rest of the year China will set a new annual record for itself.
Link here. The press release notes that the spacecraft’s instruments are one by one being made operational without problem and that it has also successfully completed a second course adjustment.
The release also provided a link to a page which will shows the probe’s present location. This is useful, as it also shows the probe’s position in relation to the Sun, Venus, and the Earth.
Before they will resume the journey up Mount Sharp the Curiosity science team now plans two more drilling attempts on Vera Rubin Ridge.
The rover has never encountered a place with so much variation in color and texture, according to Ashwin Vasavada, Curiosity’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. JPL leads the Mars Science Laboratory mission that Curiosity is a part of.
“The ridge isn’t this monolithic thing — it has two distinct sections, each of which has a variety of colors,” Vasavada said. “Some are visible to the eye and even more show up when we look in near-infrared, just beyond what our eyes can see. Some seem related to how hard the rocks are.”
Part of this drilling campaign will also include gaining a better understanding better their improvised drilling technique.
Link here. The article really only provides one new detail about the flight itself, that the rocket used solid rocket motors. This fact, plus the overall secrecy, suggest to me that the company, iSpace, is doing its work for the Chinese military.
The article at the link also provides a good overview of the entire Chinese “private” smallsat rocket industry.
China is still run from the top, so any “private” rocket company must have the approval and support of the government. What makes China different from Russia, also ruled from the top, is the Chinese government’s willingness to encourage competitive independent operations, something the Russians has not done. The result is that China’s rocket industry is not stagnating, but growing.
According to reports in Russia today, Roscosmos head Dmitri Rogozin suggested earlier this week that an “unsteady hand” had made several attempts to drill a hole in the Soyuz capsule.
“There is another version that we are not ruling out; that this was done deliberately in space,” Russian news agency RIA Novosti quoted Rogozin saying.
He indicated there were “several attempts to use a drill” by an “unsteady hand,” scraping the metal areas surrounding the hole, according to RIA Novosti. “We can cut short the idea that this was a technological mistake made by some specialist or other,” he added.
The vision that immediately came to my mind was that of a drunk technician, unhappy about pay, bad living conditions, and corruption, stumbling into the capsule, drilling the hole. Later, after he sobered up he realized the disaster he had created for himself and tried to fix it secretly.
Then again, it is dangerous to take seriously anything Dmitri Rogozin says. He could be trying to spin the situation to his advantage.
Embedded below the fold, in two parts. The first segment covers two subjects in depth: First, the airleak on the Soyuz capsule on ISS and the consequences for Russia, and second, the controversy over the decision by the filmmakers of the movie First Man to leave out the scene where the astronauts planted the American flag on the Moon. With the second topic I outline my present thoughts about this in detail, something I think my readers might find edifying.
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Fascist academia: Northeast Wisconsin Technical College has blocked a student from handing out “Jesus loves you” valentines, calling her actions “disruptive.”
A Wisconsin student sued her school on Tuesday after the administration labeled her a “disruptive student” for handing out Valentine’s Day cards reading “Jesus loves you.” Northeast Wisconsin Technical College (NWTC) student Polly Olsen sued her school for what she termed an “unconstitutional” Public Assembly Policy, according to a lawsuit obtained by Campus Reform. “Ms. Olsen was not selling the Valentines, soliciting donations, or asking the recipients for anything. Everyone was free to decline them.”
NWTC restricts what it deems as “disruptive” free expression and free speech, as protected by the First Amendment, to a tiny box on campus that makes up less than one percent of the campus. Olsen described the school’s “free speech zone” as “about the size of two buses next to each other,” highlighting the fact that no one “congregates there, they just walk through,” something she suggested prohibited her from having meaningful conversations with others.
The school’s restrictive speech policy appears blatantly unconstitutional. At the minimum it is oppressive and unreasonable, preventing individuals from exercising their first amendment rights. I hope she wins, costing the school both money and reputation. It is not a place I’d send my kids.
An evening pause: Very beautifully done, but I must admit that my back hurt watching some of this.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
The uncertainty of science: According to new research the world’s tree canopy has grown by almost a million square miles since 1982.
While the area of bare ground and short vegetation is diminishing, forest area is growing. As Ronald Bailey notes in Reason, “Forests in montane regions are expanding as climate warming enables trees to grow higher up on mountains.”
The greatest increase in tree canopy occurred in Europe, including European Russia, where it exploded by 35%. A close second was found in China, where tree canopy gained 34%. In the U.S., tree canopy increased by 15%.
This study confirms numerous other forest and agricultural research that has shown that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere encourages plant growth. Numerous other studies have also found that the Earth has been greening in the past century.
My review of the scientific literature on this subject also matches this finding, having found that if global warming is happening, research looking at what has actually happened generally show that increased CO2 and warming have tended to have beneficial effects, despite the endless doomsday predictions by global warming scientists of what might happen.
I must apologize for the lack of posting the past two days. Diane and I have been up in northern Arizona staying at a friend’s cabin, hiking each day. The picture on the right shows Diane (right) and Jan Jantzer, whose house we have been staying, on today’s hike in Black Canyon, a canyon near Heber that is known by locals but is off the radar for most everyone else. Quite beautiful, especially because the recent rain has brought out the wildflowers. In addition, a forest fire about a dozen years ago cleared everything out, leaving behind a scattering of blackened tree trunks, many fallen logs, and open ground on which new growth has blossomed.
The canyon is also different in that it is wide and open, with sloping grassy walls interspersed with rocky cliffs. Most canyon hikes aim for high vertical walls and sculptured rock. Black Canyon instead was focused on the vegetation. As I said, very beautiful, and another example of why I left the crowded eastern United States for lovely Arizona.
I must add that the general news this week is so insane and filled with hatred that I needed a break.
Normal posting shall resume momentarily.
iSpace, a Chinese smallsat rocket company, completed a suborbital test rocket launch today, releasing three cubesats.
The article at the link is very short and poorly written. It implies that two cubesats reached orbit, with a third returning to Earth using a parachute. This was clearly a suborbital flight
The uncertainty of science: A long term analysis of data from the probe Cassini suggests that Saturn’s north polar hexagonal vortex might tower many miles high above the planet’s clouds.
A new long-term study has now spotted the first glimpses of a northern polar vortex forming high in the atmosphere as Saturn’s northern hemisphere approached summertime. This warm vortex sits hundreds of kilometres above the clouds, in a layer of atmosphere known as the stratosphere, and reveals an unexpected surprise. “The edges of this newly-found vortex appear to be hexagonal, precisely matching a famous and bizarre hexagonal cloud pattern we see deeper down in Saturn’s atmosphere,” says Leigh Fletcher of the University of Leicester, UK, lead author of the new study.
“While we did expect to see a vortex of some kind at Saturn’s north pole as it grew warmer, its shape is really surprising. Either a hexagon has spawned spontaneously and identically at two different altitudes, one lower in the clouds and one high in the stratosphere, or the hexagon is in fact a towering structure spanning a vertical range of several hundred kilometres.”
There are many uncertainties here. For one thing, we have not yet even observed Saturn from up close through a complete year. We might be seeing random weather events having nothing to do with the gas giants overall planetary weather patterns.
The Russians are going to give all Progress and Soyuz capsules being prepared for launch a new inspection following the discovery that the airleak on the Soyuz docked with ISS had been caused by a technician on the ground prior to launch and covered up.
The consequences to Russia’s space industry because of this incident are going to be difficult to measure. It surely signals that they have still not got a handle on their quality control problems. In fact, it provides further proof that the technical work coming out of Russia is shoddy, sloppy, and filled with many forms of corruption, all circumstances that should give pause to anyone thinking of flying a product or themselves on a Russian-made product.
Worse, the centralized government-run space industry created by Putin is exactly the wrong thing for fixing these problems. Russia does not have a competitive and free aerospace industry. Everything is run by the government and based on the ability to wield political power rather the ability to demonstrate skill and quality in how you do your job.
With only five launches expected in 2019, Russia’s space program is sinking to the level of a third world country. This airleak disaster will only help it sink further.
One last note: I predicted this kind of disaster back in 2013, when the consolidation of Russia’s aerospace industry was announced by the Putin government. My prediction was not very difficult, nor especially brilliant, since disasters like this always occur from government-run top-down socialist/communist systems. One only has to be patient. It is only a matter of time before the system fails, and fails badly.
The airleak last week on ISS in the orbital module of a Soyuz capsule was not caused by a micrometeorite but by an accidental drill hole made by a technician on the ground who then, rather than reporting it, sealed it and covered it up..
“The hole was made on the ground. The person responsible for the act of negligence has been identified,” the source told the news agency.
Another source said a worker apparently accidentally drilled the hole, but instead of reporting it, simply sealed it. The sealant held for at least the two months the Soyuz spacecraft spent in orbit, before finally drying up and being pushed out of the hole by air pressure.
According to a Moskovsky Komsomolets report, the hole was located near the toilet and covered by decorative fabric. The Russian crew members used an epoxy-based sealant with metallic additives to plug both the hole and a fracture in the outer hull of the Soyuz located behind it, the newspaper said.
Well, if anything is going to put an end to the resistance to using privately built American manned capsule, this should do it. This is also going to do a great deal of harm to the Russian desire to sell tourist seats on their Soyuz.
Posted from Heber, Arizona.
As it does the first Sunday of each month, yesterday NOAA posted its monthly update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for August 2018. And as I do every month, I am posting it below, annotated to give it some context.
The Sun in August had a slight uptick in sunspot activity, but not a very significant one. As such, the slide to solar minimum continues. Right now the lack of sunspot activity in 2018 is heading to match or even exceed 2007, the year in which the previous solar minimum began.
The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.
If you look at the original graph at NOAA, you will see that we are getting very close to the right edge of the graph. I expect that sometime in the next few months NOAA will update the graph, a necessary act that will in one sense be a shame, as they have been adding monthly updates to this graph since the beginning of the last solar minimum. This has allowed everyone to see a standard visual, month to month, for comparing solar activity. It has also allowed me to annotate the graph properly to show how the 2007 and 2009 predictions held up against actual activity. Once the graph changes it will be more difficult to do this.
Anyway, it is very clear we are entering solar minimum, and that the solar cycle we are now completing will be both a short and weak cycle. What happens next is really the big question. Will the Sun sunspot activity recover? Or will we enter the first grand minimum since the 1600s? Either way, for solar scientists the coming years are going to be very exciting.
Posted on interstate 10 going from Tucson to Phoenix, on the way to the wooded northern forests of Arizona, where Diane and I will spend a couple of days visiting friends at their upstate cabin/home.
