6-Figure Revenue – How To Start a Blueberry Farm Business
An evening pause: When people are free they do great things, for their own benefit. The company, Bulldog Berries.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Category: Behind The Black
January 5, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- Chinese pseudo-company Landspace touts video of rocket engine static fire test
As Jay notes, “Look at all the test firings happening at the same time. This must have been commanded from above [by] Xi, the CCP, or the PLA, to show off Chinese technology.” All three have launches proposed this year and next, with Landspace the most developed of the three.
- ULA’s Vulcan rocket rolls from assembly building to its launchpad
The rocket’s first launch, carrying Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander, is still targeting January 8, 2023. ULA’s live stream of the launch can be found here.
- 75 years ago today Chuck Yaeger flew the Bell X-1 supersonic plane in its only ground take-off
All other X-1 flights were released in the air from the bottom of either a Boeing B-29 or a B-50 Superfortress.
Canyons formed from the giant crack that splits Mars
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on September 22, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a complex of north-south trending canyons, with easternmost cliff about 400 feet high (though the full drop to the large canyon on its east is closer to 800 feet).
These canyons however have nothing to do with ice or water flow. They were formed by underground tectonic forces that pushed the ground upward, forced it to split and form cracks. Those cracks in turn produced these canyons. In some cases, such as the depression on top of the central ridge, the formation process probably occurred because fissures formed below ground, causing the surface to sag.
As always, the hiker in me wants to walk up the nose of that ridge and then along its western edge, with the western canyon on my left and that smaller depression on my right.
The larger context of this location is in itself even more spectacular.
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SpaceX sues to have NLRB complaint dismissed
SpaceX yesterday filed a lawsuit in the federal courts to have the employee complaint filed by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) dismissed as a violation of the company’s fifth and seventh amendment rights as well as article II of the Constitution.
You can read SpaceX’s lawsuit here [pdf]. It specifically lists as defendants the board members of the NLRB, as well as the unnamed administrative judge who will run the NLRB’s case, once it begins.
The SpaceX lawsuit is interesting in that it challenges the very legal structure that has established the NLRB, stating that its actions are illegal because that structure forbids the President from having full control over its actions, as required by article II of the Constitution.
Whether this lawsuit succeeds is of course unknown, but its quick filing tells us that SpaceX was prepared for this NLRB action, even before it was filed. It also tells us that the company now recognizes the overall threat to it by the Biden administration, which appears to be trying to weaponize every agency in the federal government to destroy the company, and is prepared to fight long and hard against this abuse of power.
Japan’s XRISM X-ray space telescope releases first data
Supernova remnant N132D, as seen in X-rays
Click for original image.
Japan’s XRISM X-ray space telescope, which launched in September, has now released first data and images.
One image showed the wide field view of the telescope’s Xtend imager, capable of viewing in X-rays an area of the sky 60% larger than the Moon. The second, shown to the right, provided a false color image of a supernova remnant in the Large Magellanic Cloud along with spectroscopy that data provided. According to the caption, “the spectrum reveals peaks associated with silicon, sulfur, argon, calcium, and iron.”
These pictures were produced during the telescope’s check-out period since launch. The mission, though Japanese-led, is being managed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, which is now accepting observation proposals for a full science schedule of observations to begin in the summer of this year.
Researchers propose method for removing toxic perchlorates from Martian water
Of the twelve research grants just awarded by NASA to develop a variety of new technologies for astronomy and future space exploration, one proposes a new method for removing the toxic perchlorates that are thought to exist in all Martian water.
What if we could make the perchlorates just vanish? This is the innovative solution we propose here, taking advantage of the reduction of chlorate and perchlorate to chloride and oxygen being thermodynamically favorable, if kinetically slow. This is the promise of our regenerative perchlorate reduction system, leveraging synthetic biology to take advantage of and improve upon natural perchlorate reducing bacteria.
These terrestrial microbes are not directly suitable for off-world use, but their key genes pcrAB and cld, which catalyze the reduction of perchlorates to chloride and oxygen, have been previously identified and well-studied. This proposed work exploits the prior work studying perchlorate-reducing bacteria by engineering this perchlorate reduction pathway into the spaceflight proven Bacillus subtilis strain 168, under the control of a robust, active promoter. This solution is highly sustainable and scalable, and unlike traditional water purification approaches, outright eliminates perchlorates rather than filtering them to dump somewhere nearby.
Essentially the researchers will try to engineer bacteria known to be able to survive space so that it carries genes from another microbe able of changing the perchlorate into chloride and oxygen.
This study as well as the other eleven are only in phase one of their contracts, with the award of later phases determined by their initial successes or failures.
Japan delays launch of Mars sample return mission due to problems with its H3 rocket
Japan’s space agency JAXA last week officially delayed the launch of its MMX Mars sample return mission, from later this year until the next Mars launch window in 2026.
A September 2024 launch would have seen MMX reach the Red Planet in August 2025 and return to Earth with around 0.35 oz (10 grams) of samples of the Mars moon Phobos in 2029. But the mission now must wait until the next Mars launch window opens in late 2026; its samples are slated to reach Earth in 2031.
The delay is because of JAXA’s ongoing problems getting its new H3 rocket off the ground. The first test launch last year failed, and though the next launch attempt is now scheduled for February, the agency decided it wanted more time to prove out the rocket before putting the Mars mission on it.
This decision once again highlights the overall failure of JAXA to produce for Japan a viable space effort. It is long past time for the Japanese government to take control from this agency, and allow the private sector to compete freely for business. Right now Japan’s continuing failures in space are downright embarrassing, compared to its Asian neighbors of China, India, and South Korea.
NASA and one private company respond to Navaho nation’s demand to cancel lunar mission
Both NASA and one of the private companies involved in ULA’s first Vulcan rocket launch on January 8, 2023 that will carry the Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander to the Moon have now responded to the Navaho nation, which has stated its religion gives it the unlimited right to decide what can go there.
Navaho President Buu Nygren had claimed earlier this week that the “Moon is sacred to numerous Indigenous cultures” and the payloads of human ashes being sent to the Moon was “tantamount to desecration.” He demanded the mission be delayed or canceled.
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China’s Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueled rocket launches four weather satellites
China today successfully completed its first launch in 2024, its Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueled rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China carrying four weather satellites.
No information was released about where the rocket’s lower stages crashed inside China. Nor did China’s state run press provide any information on the payloads, other than to say they will most be “used to provide commercial meteorological data services.”
The 2024 launch race:
2 SpaceX
1 India
1 China
Jara – Tiempo y Silencio
An evening pause: In English the song is “Time and Silence.” Lyrics:
A house in the sky
A garden in the sea
A lark in your chest
a return of the beginA wish of stars
A sparrow’s heartbeat
An island in your bed
A sunsetTime and silence
Screams and songs
Heaven and kisses
Voice and griefTo be born in your laugh
To grow in your weeping
To live on your shoulder
To die in your arms
Hat tip Judd Clark
January 4, 2024 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- ULA video describes the mission profile of its first Vulcan launch scheduled for January 8th
According to the video, the Celestis payload of human ashes is not on the Astrobotic lunar lander, as I had thought, but are on the rocket upper stage, which will go into solar orbit after completing its mission. If so, the Navaho whining about putting human remains on the Moon was even more inappropriate and stupid.
- India’s Aditya-L1 solar telescope to make its final manuever this coming weekend
It will arrive at the L1 point one million miles closer to the Sun, where it will observe the Sun in partnership with several other solar telescopes.
- 20 years ago today the rover Spirit landed on Mars
It lasted six years, far more than its planned 90 day mission.
- 25 years ago today Mars Polar Lander was launched
All contact with the spacecraft ended shortly before its final engine burn to enter Mars atmosphere. It is thought that engine burn ended prematurely, causing the spacecraft to crash.
- The May 2024 launch China’s Chang’e-6 sample return mission to the Moon remains on target
It will try to bring back the first samples from the Moon’s far side.
Can the Democrats offend enough people to make even their aggressive election tampering impossible?
I normally pay little attention to polls, since for the last two decades they have not only been unreliable but generally weighted unfairly against Republicans. More often than not they have been used not to give us a sense of the state of the political campaign but to make us all believe a Democratic Party victory was inevitable.
However, a poll this week was so astonishing that I think it deserves some discussion. According to a national USA Today-Suffolk University poll published on January 2, 2023 by USA Today, large numbers of blacks, Hispanics, and young voters are now willing to abandon the Democratic Party, and do so in numbers that are shocking and unprecedented. As noted in this article about the poll,
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