Category: Behind The Black

White House issues “policy framework” to lobby for its space regulatory proposal

9:28 am

Faced with stiff opposition from industry and politicians from both parties in Congress to its regulatory proposal issued in mid-November, the White House yesterday released what it called a “policy framework” for implementing that proposal.

You can read this policy framework here [pdf]. It is filled with high-sounding claims about its goal is to encourage private development and reduce red tape, but in the end it only adds more government entities to the entire bureaucracy that regulates commercial space. From the framework itself:

The Secretaries of Commerce and Transportation will co-lead a Private Sector Space Activities Interagency Steering Group in consultation with the Chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), comprising representation from the Departments of Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, Interior, and State, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and any other Federal entities with expertise or equities pertaining to private sector novel space activities, including relevant stakeholders from the Executive Office of the President. The Steering Group serves as a coordinating body to ensure that the U.S. Government oversight system is prepared to meet U.S. priorities while taking into consideration the competitiveness of U.S. industry now and into the future.

One of the criticisms of the White House proposal from mid-November was that it would split regulation between Commerce and Transportation, thus increasing the complexity for commerical companies. This steering group is clearly an effort to answer those complaints, but based on this proposal, it simply adds one more bureaucratic layer to the mix, making things even more complicated.

The framework also calls for the expansion of the government’s regulatory footprint on several fronts, such as controlling orbital debris, and achieved through “expanding existing, or establish new, federal advisory committees to account for all expanded space authorities in furtherance of this Framework and related legislative proposals.”

From the viewpoint of freedom, this entire proposal reads like a zombie end-of-the-world horror film, with bureaucratic zombies appearing endlessly from all directions, aimed at consuming any independent private company as quickly and as thoroughly as possible.

The original commercial space act proposal from Congress, that the Biden administration (and most Democrats) oppose but carries the endorsement of the private commercial space industry, was passed by its House committee, but still needs to be voted on by the full House, as well as the Senate. Because it remains in limbo, the White House has issued this framework, in the hope it can give its side the ammunition needed to defeat that bill and replace it with the White House’s.

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A movie of 14 years of gamma ray observations from space

8:49 am

Link here. I have also embedded the movie below. The movie was made from fourteen years of observations by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope in orbit around the Earth. From the press release:

Gamma rays are the highest-energy form of light. The movie shows the intensity of gamma rays with energies above 200 million electron volts detected by Fermi’s Large Area Telescope (LAT) between August 2008 and August 2022. For comparison, visible light has energies between 2 and 3 electron volts. Brighter colors mark the locations of more intense gamma-ray sources.

“One of the first things to strike your eye in the movie is a source that steadily arcs across the screen. That’s our Sun, whose apparent movement reflects Earth’s yearly orbital motion around it,” said Fermi Deputy Project Scientist Judy Racusin, who narrates a tour of the movie, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Most of the time, the LAT detects the Sun faintly due to the impact of accelerated particles called cosmic rays – atomic nuclei traveling close to the speed of light. When they strike the Sun’s gas or even the light it emits, gamma rays result. At times, though, the Sun suddenly brightens with powerful eruptions called solar flares, which can briefly make our star one of the sky’s brightest gamma-ray sources.

The movie shows the sky in two different views. The rectangular view shows the entire sky with the center of our galaxy in the middle. This highlights the central plane of the Milky Way, which glows in gamma rays produced from cosmic rays striking interstellar gas and starlight. It’s also flecked with many other sources, including neutron stars and supernova remnants. Above and below this central band, we’re looking out of our galaxy and into the wider universe, peppered with bright, rapidly changing sources.

Most of these are actually distant galaxies, and they’re better seen in a different view centered on our galaxy’s north and south poles. Each of these galaxies, called blazars, hosts a central black hole with a mass of a million or more Suns.

Fermi is essentially mapping the high energy objects of the entire universe.
» Read more

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Russia launches military satellite

8:37 am

Russia early this morning successfully launched a classified military satellite, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Plesetsk spaceport in northern Russia.

No word on where the rocket’s strap-on boosters or first stage crashed within Russia.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

92 SpaceX
61 China
18 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 105 to 61, and the entire world combined 105 to 97. SpaceX by itself now trails the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 92 to 97.

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Starship prototype #28 completes full duration static fire test

8:49 pm

Gearing up for Starship/Superheavy orbital test flight #3: Starship prototype #28 today successfully completed a full duration static fire test, with all six engines firing for about five seconds.

The link goes to SpaceX’s X feed, and shows that test.

This is more evidence that SpaceX intends to be ready in all ways to do that third orbital test flight of Superheavy/Starship by mid-January, at the latest. It also suggests the company is getting close to finishing its investigation into the previous test flight in mid-November.

Of course, none of this means it will launch in mid-January. I predict SpaceX will be stuck twiddling its thumbs waiting for a launch license from the FAA, which will also be waiting for an okay from Fish & Wildlife. Both will likely be forced to work as slowly as possible, likely because of interference from the White House.

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Glacial layers in Mars’ glacier country

2:40 pm

Glacial layers in Mars' glacier country
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 20, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It features a 250-foot-high north-south cliff that appears to have numerous horizontal layers within it.

Moreover, both on the plateau above the cliff as well as the floor below it, the entire surface seems to resemble a thick snow/ice field, made even more evident by the distortion of many craters and the apparent glacial material inside each crater.

The layers suggest that this ice was laid down in a series of cycles. During cold periods snow fell and accumulated as ice over time. When things became warmer some of that ice sublimated away, but not all. With the next cold cycle a new layer was put down.

The many layers suggest many climate cycles on Mars, none of which were caused by SUVs or coal-firing electrical power stations.
» Read more

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The Biden war against Musk is a war against America

1:33 pm

How the modern Democratic Party has evolved madly to the left, according to Elon Musk
How the modern Democratic Party has evolved
madly to the left, according to Elon Musk

In 2022 Elon Musk essentially completed the long process of going from what he described as a moderate who had previously voted overwhelming for Democrats to a Republican voter strongly hostile to the present Democratic Party.

He announced this shift in a tweet on May 18, 2022, in which he said the following:

In the past I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party.

But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.

Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold. [emphasis mine]

In the almost twenty months since Musk made that statement, his prediction of a “dirty tricks campaign” by the Democrats has become quite evident and true. Numerous federal agencies under the control of President Joe Biden began taking strong actions to stymie Musk’s companies, sometimes abusing the law in what appear to be legitimate ways, and sometimes abusing power in ways that are absurd. Below is a short list, many of which have been repeatedly reported here at Behind the Black:
» Read more

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Ingenuity’s most recent flight, the 68th, a mystery

9:54 am

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

UPDATE: See this December 26, 2023 post for more accurate information.

Original post:
————————–
According to a recent update to the flight log of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity, it finally completed its 68th flight on December 15, 2023, not on December 9, 2023 as announced in the flight plan on December 8th.

More significantly, the flight only traveled 1,289 feet (393 meters), not the 2,716 feet (828 meters) intended. The flight was supposed to travel out to the northeast and then return to its take-off point, indicated by the green dot on the map above, completing a “flight test” as well as scouting the ground below. It appears it did not do this, but where the 68th flight actually went and landed has as yet not been released. According to the flight plan, Ingenuity likely landed somewhere in Neretva Vallis to the northeast, as indicated by the green line.

What we do know is that the engineering team knows enough about Ingenuity’s condition to release today the flight plan for the 69th flight, which was actually scheduled to occur yesterday. That flight plan calls for Ingenuity to travel about 2,300 feet to the east-northeast and then return to its take-off point.

Meanwhile, Perseverance (the blue dot) is working its way west back to its planned route, the red dotted line.

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Congress passes short term extension of commercial space regulatory “learning period”

9:19 am

The Senate yesterday passed a short term extension of the regulatory “learning period” at the FAA that limits its ability to regulate commercial space.

[The Senate] quickly passed an extension of the FAA’s authorization, a final piece of “must pass” legislation before the end of the year. The bill (H.R. 6503) passed the House on December 11. Among other things, it extends the “learning period” for commercial human spaceflight until March 9, 2024 that otherwise would have expired on January 1. The learning period, or “moratorium,” prohibits the FAA from promulgating new regulations on commercial human spaceflight while the industry is in its infancy.

The president still needs to sign this bill, but that is expected.

Originally passed in 2004 as an eight-year period, this “learning period” has been extended several times since. The industry wants a longer extension, as it still considers itself quite rightly to be in an experimental test phase, not operational in the sense of airplane manufacture.

Not that this extension matters. It appears in the past two years that the regulators at the FAA have decided to ignore the law and make believe this learning period really doesn’t exist, based on how that agency has treated test launches by SpaceX and others. Rather than let their launches proceed quickly as tests, the FAA has begun to treat each test as an operational flight that requires a long investigation before further launch approvals are given.

Unless there is a major change in leadership in the White House, we should expect a major slow-down of the American launch industry in the coming years, regardless of whether this “learning period” is extended or not.

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A bubbly dwarf galaxy

9:09 am

A bubbly dwarf galaxy
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was released today by the science team of the Hubble Space Telescope, and shows an irregular dwarf galaxy that is about seven million light years away.

Twelve camera filters were combined to produce this image, with light from the mid-ultraviolet through to the red end of the visible spectrum. The red patches are likely interstellar hydrogen molecules that are glowing because they have been excited by the light from hot, energetic stars. The other sparkles on show in this image are a mix of older stars. An array of distant, diverse galaxies appear in the background, captured by Hubble’s sharp view.

The data used in this image were taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 and the Advanced Camera for Surveys from 2006 to 2021.

The picture was taken as part of a study of dwarf galaxies, their make-up, and how their mergers eventually create the larger galaxies like the Milky Way.

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First segments of Extremely Large Telescope have shipped to Chile

8:58 am

After 20 years of development, the first eighteen segments of Europe’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) have now shipped to Chile, with another 780 more segments to go.

The assembly of the telescope’s massive mirrors will take place over the next 4 years. This week, the first segments of what will be the main mirror – called ‘M1’ – arrived in Chile.

Once complete in 2028, these segments will create a primary mirror 40 meters across, about 131 feet, four times larger than the 10.4 meter Gran Telescopio in the Canary Islands, presently the largest telescope in operation.

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