Category: Behind The Black

China’s Kuaizhou-1A solid-fueled rocket launches four weather satellites

9:09 am

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

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Jara – Tiempo y Silencio

6:01 pm

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 begin

A wish of stars
A sparrow’s heartbeat
An island in your bed
A sunset

Time and silence
Screams and songs
Heaven and kisses
Voice and grief

To be born in your laugh
To grow in your weeping
To live on your shoulder
To die in your arms

Hat tip Judd Clark

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January 4, 2024 Quick space links

3:59 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

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Can the Democrats offend enough people to make even their aggressive election tampering impossible?

3:24 pm

Are Americans finally waking up and emulating their country's founders?

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,
» Read more

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John Batchelor highlights Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8

1:19 pm

At 11 pm (Eastern) during the third hour of John Batchelor’s show tonight and tomorrow he will air a long two hour interview with me discussing my book Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8. After many years he finally decided his listeners deserved a full discussion of what is to many the most historically important Apollo mission to the Moon. It might not have landed on the Moon but what the astronauts accomplished and said changed the nation, and will likely be remembered forever.

Tune in if you are interested. Even better, consider reading the book. In fact, the best thing of all would be to give the book to any high school students in your family. They will learn more about American history and the Cold War by reading it than they get nowadays from their entire public school education.

I will also embed the podcasts here when they become available.

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The mining potential on Mars

11:01 am

The mining potential on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on October 30, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Labeled simply as a “terrain sample,” it was probably taken not as part of any specific research project but to fill a gap in the schedule in order to properly maintain the camera’s temperature.

Nonetheless, the larger region where this photo is located is one of great interest to scientists as well as to future explorers. First note the colors. The wide variations between the bright orange of that peak (only a few tens of feet high) and the light orange and aqua-green of the bedrock to the north and south suggest a terrain with a lot of different materials within it.

The location is in the dry equatorial regions, so the swirls visible on the plateaus north and south of that small peak are not related to near surface ice. Instead, this is warped bedrock, with those swirls also suggesting material of a varied nature, exposed to the surface by erosion processes.
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Hubble detects changes in atmosphere of exoplanet

10:16 am

Using data from collected in 2016, 2018, and 2019 combined with computer simulations, scientists now believe they have detected changes in the atmosphere of the exoplanet WASP-121b, also nicknamed Tylos.

The Jupiter-sized planet orbits a star about 880 light years away.

WASP-121 b is so close to its parent star that the orbital period is only 1.27 days. This close proximity means that the planet is tidally locked so that the same hemisphere always faces the star, in the same way that our Moon always has the same side pointed at Earth. Daytime temperatures approach 3,450 degrees Fahrenheit (2,150 degrees Kelvin) on the star-facing side of the planet.

The team used four sets of Hubble archival observations of WASP-121 b. The complete data-set included observations of WASP-121 b transiting in front of its star (taken in June 2016); WASP-121 b passing behind its star, also known as a secondary eclipse (taken in November 2016); and the brightness of WASP-121 b as a function of its phase angle to the star (the varying amount of light received at Earth from an exoplanet as it orbits its parent star, similar to our Moon’s phase-cycle). These data were taken in March 2018 and February 2019, respectively.

A computer model was then used to fill in the gaps and provide a simulation of the hot temperatures of that exoplanet’s atmosphere over time. Two videos of that simulation are available at the link.

There of course is a lot of uncertainty in this result, though the fundamental discovery of changes is important. This data proves there is weather on such alien planets, even if that weather is so alien we really don’t understand it in the slightest based on the available data on hand.

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National Labor Relations Board files complaint against SpaceX

9:51 am

Elon Musk, a target for destruction by Joe Biden
Elon Musk, a target for destruction
by Joe Biden

The Biden administration’s continuing legal harassment of SpaceX and Elon Musk was escalated yesterday when the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) filed a new complaint against the company, accusing it of firing eight employees illegally for writing a public letter criticizing the company in 2022.

The letter, circulated in 2022, criticized Musk’s actions and the allegations of sexual harassment against him, claiming they were negatively contributing to the company’s reputation. The letter also said the company was failing to live up to its “No Asshole” policy and its policy against sexual harassment.

The letter, whose authorship was not known at the time it was first reported, called on SpaceX to “publicly address and condemn Elon’s harmful Twitter behavior,” to “hold all leadership equally accountable” for bad behavior, and to “clearly define what exactly is intended by SpaceX’s ‘no-asshole’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies and enforce them consistently.”

According to the NLRB, one SpaceX employer held interviews to determine the writers of the letter, after which they were fired. The case will go before the NLRB in March.

Is this another case of blacklisting, similar to the numerous stories I’ve reported for the last four years where someone was fired for having political opinions? I don’t think so, though some could argue otherwise. In those many other cases, the opinions expressed were generally political in nature and unrelated to the work environment itself. If a company is demanding you bow to critical race theory and admit you are racist simply because you are white and fires you when you refuse, that is not the same as writing a letter accusing your employer of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment, and then soliciting signatures from the entire workforce before releasing it publicly. The first case is a direct slander against the employee and is an unreasonable demand. The second is a concerted effort to foster a workplace mutiny, something unacceptable to all employers. It seems the company would have the right to remove such malcontents from its place of business.

Gywnne Shotwell, SpaceX’s CEO, made these facts very clear at the time the letter was published.
» Read more

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SpaceX launches commercial communications satellite

9:27 pm

SpaceX today successfully launched a commercial geosynchronous communications satellite, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage successfully completed its tenth flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The fairings completed their ninth and fourteenth flights respectively.

The 2024 launch race:

2 SpaceX
1 India

No one else has launched as yet, though many launches are scheduled through the first ten days of January.

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Carly Simon – That’s The Way I Always Heard It Should Be

6:01 pm

An evening pause: Performed live in Central Park, New York, 1971. Wonderful song, but her cynicism about marriage in this song sadly predicts the disaster we are in today, living in a society of children raised in broken homes, created by the 60s Baby Boom generation (mine) that decided to reject the fundamentals of its parents. It was foolish and sad, but most of all it was cruel to the innocent children born of that irresponsibility. Those children are now mindlessly wrecking their revenge.

Hat tip Doug Johnson.

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January 3, 2024 Quick space links

3:39 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. I am probably taking most of the rest of the day off, having just gotten back from cataract surgery on one eye. No problems, but I don’t have a lot of energy right now. If I perk up something might happen, but I can’t say if that will be the case.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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