The competition heats up: Blue Origin has completed construction of one of two new test cells for the development of its BE-4 rocket engine, only seven months after the company made the decision to build them.
Microsoft and Facebook have announced plans to lay a trans-Atlantic communications cable from Virginia to Spain.
Running from Virginia Beach, Virgina to Bilbao, Spain, MAREA (which is Spanish for “tide”), it will be the first cable to connect the US to southern Europe, over a distance of 6,600 km (4,100 miles). From Blibao, it will connect to network hubs in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia, with the goal of improving speed and reliability. For Microsoft this means improvements for users of its cloud services, such as Bing, Office 365, Skype, Xbox Live, and Microsoft Azure, while for Facebook it means improvements for users of its eponymous social network.
I find this story very puzzling. The whole reason communication satellites exist is because they have historically been far cheaper to build and launch with far greater capacity than ocean cables. Thus, the decision of these companies to go with an undersea cable instead of satellites suggests that something has changed in that equation, though I can’t see what. Have undersea cables improved so much that they have a bigger capacity than satellites, so much bigger that it compensates for the higher cost of installation and maintenance?
Embedded below the fold. This segment I spent a lot of time talking about the state of ground-based astronomy, spurred by the problems at TMT and the beginnings of the construction of E-ELT.
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Link here. Read it and weep, as this essay describes to a T a steadily increasing number of citizens, from all political persuasions.
The competition heats up: The next Chinese lunar probe will be an unmanned sample return mission
They hope to fly it in the second half of 2017.
The competition heats up: The next New Shepard test flight will try to land the capsule with only two of three parachutes.
No date for the flight was announced.
Finding out what’s in it: Because of Obamacare, health insurance companies across the nation are requesting rate increases next year ranging from 8 to 65%, with the average increase running about 24%.
Too bad no one predicted this, except for every conservative think tank, every Republican politician, and the entire Tea Party movement. Luckily, President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party had our backs, and ignored those predictions. Otherwise, where would we be?
During my caving trip to Belize last week, we reserved one day off to do some sightseeing. The goal that day was to visit the Mayan ruins of Tikal, across the border in Guatemala about three hours from our resort in Belize.
Arranging this trip was not straightforward. We couldn’t simply get in our rental car and drive off. Locals have found it a bad idea to drive Belizean vehicles in Guatemala, as they are more likely to be attacked. So, the resort arranged for a Belizean driver to take us to the border, where it also arranged for us to be met by a Guatemalan tour guide with her own car.
On the way, we drove through several small towns of both Guatemala and Belize, as shown by the two photos below, with Santa Elena, Belize on top.
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The competition heats up: Planetary Resources, the company that claims its goal is to mine asteroids, has raised $21 million to build and launch an Earth resources satellite.
They plan to create a 10-satellite constellation to provide this data commercially.
While everything this company is doing will eventually make asteroid mining easier and more effective, nothing they are doing now has anything to do with mining asteroids. Their first project was to build a prototype orbiting telescope to look for asteroids. This second project will sell data about the Earth.
The uncertainty of science: Astronomers have discovered a Jupiter-class exoplanet orbiting a very young star, something their models of planetary formation told them shouldn’t happen.
“For decades, conventional wisdom held that large Jupiter-mass planets take a minimum of 10 million years to form,” said Christopher Johns-Krull, the lead author of a new study about the planet, CI Tau b, that will be published in The Astrophysical Journal. “That’s been called into question over the past decade, and many new ideas have been offered, but the bottom line is that we need to identify a number of newly formed planets around young stars if we hope to fully understand planet formation.”
CI Tau b is at least eight times larger than Jupiter and orbits a 2 million-year-old star about 450 light years from Earth in the constellation Taurus.
In other words, a planet that, according to the present models for planetary formation, supposedly needs 10 million years to form is orbiting a star only 2 million years old. In other words, the models are wrong. We simply don’t know enough yet about planetary formation to create any reliable models.
Link here. The author tries to thoughtfully predict what Trump will do should he win the Presidency, based on his record. This quote at the article’s beginning however describes Trump quite accurately:
My biases are clear up front: I don’t trust Trump. I don’t trust his promises, because he has shown no willingness to hold to them. I don’t trust his ideology, because he proclaims that his guiding star is his own self-assurance. I trust Trump to be Trump: a man of convenience, a thinker of no great depth, a reactionary with no constitutional understanding and a willingness to maximize executive power.
The analysis is fair, however, and notes some smart things Trump might do, based on his past record, as well as the dumb things we can expect from him.
I post this not to suggest I prefer Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. I do not. Clinton is a corrupt, power-hungry leftwing ideologue who will magnify all the bad things Barack Obama has done, supported by a corrupt, power-hungry leftwing Democratic Party that likes everything Barack Obama has done. We need to do everything we can to prevent her election.
At the same time, we mustn’t blind ourselves to the problems we will face should Trump win. This article is a warning. Prepare yourself, because things are not going to be much better under a Trump presidency, and the best option for minimizing that damage is to make sure Congress is as conservative as possible.
Theft by government: IRS has confiscated $43 million from more than 600 innocent individuals merely because they did large cash transactions just under $10K.
The law in question forbids people from purposely breaking up deposits so that they are under $10,000 in order to avoid reporting the deposit to the government, and was originally written to target drug dealers. Instead, the government has been using it as a convenient way to steal people’s money.
After issuing a Freedom of Information Act request to the IRS, the Institute for Justice found 618 cases from 2007 to 2013 where the IRS seized funds without evidence of underlying criminal wrongdoing. When the Institute for Justice requested more information about these cases, the IRS said the group would have to pay a quarter million dollar fee because the request fell into the category of “commercial use.”
According to [Robert Johnson, lawyer for one individual whose bank account was seized], the IRS is still harassing small business owners because of their bank deposits despite the 2015 rule change [that supposedly required evidence of criminal activity before confiscation]. “Shockingly, when the IRS engages in such tactics, it can use the money that it takes to pad its own budget,” Johnson said. “When the IRS uses civil forfeiture to take money for structuring violations, the money is deposited in the Treasury Forfeiture Fund. In other words, the money that the IRS takes from hardworking Americans can be put back to work to seize money from additional Americans,” he said.
Read it all. The IRS has admitted that the individuals from whom they seized this money had committed no crime. Yet they still refuse to return the money.
The law is such an inconvenient thing: In denying a reporter a concealed carry permit, police officers told him that attorney general of D.C. had ordered them to ignore the court order requiring the city to issue permits.
The attorney general has since denied this illegal policy, but the reporter still doesn’t have his permit.
The University of Hawaii has filed a motion to have the hearing officer in charge of the new permitting process for the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) removed.
What the lawyers for TMT appear to be doing is trying to prevent further delaying tactics by those opposing the telescope. Their motion describes these delaying tactics, which involve questioning the objectivity of various officials involved, but doing it piecemeal in order to slow the permitting process down as much as possible. The officer in question has membership in an astronomy center, and though the anti-TMT forces have not yet questioned this, TMT lawyers want to act now to remove that possibility later.
Once again, I think TMT officials are spinning their wheels. Hawaii will never give them permission to build TMT. Read the ten-point plan of Hawaii’s governor for protecting Mauna Kea and you will agree. They should move the telescope to a more friendly location as soon as possible.
Engineers called a halt today to the expansion of Bigelow’s BEAM module on ISS when the procedure did not go as planned.
Originally, the plan was to use air from tanks located inside BEAM to inflate these bladders, however analysis showed that this could cause expansion to occur too fast and potentially place damagingly high loads on the ISS in the process, so instead the air will be supplied from the station in a more controlled manner. It was not actually known precisely how the inflation dynamics would occur, as it has only ever been done twice before (Genesis I and II), neither of which were viewable from external cameras such as those found on the ISS.
This proved to be a learning curve, as after two hours of adding a few seconds of air into the module, only the width expanded, as opposed to the length. Mission controllers decided it would be best to defer operations for the day to allow them to evaluate the next steps.
Brownshirts: Waving Mexican flags anti-Trump protesters at a Trump rally in California today threw objects and started fires, with a number getting arrested.
There was a very strong police presence, which appears to have contained the violence. More details here, which describes the protests in more detail, including one story of a Trump protester throwing an egg at Trump supporter.
Protesting Trump is fine. Trying to suppress a Trump rally with violence is not. To me it appears that the only thing that prevented these anti-Trump protesters from getting out of control was the police.
An evening pause: The same people who gave us the Marble Machine show us again how to use technology to make good music.
Hat tip Danae.
The 30-second static fire engine test of the Antares first stage and new Russian engine has now been scheduled for May 31.
The window for the engine test, or hot fire, is 5 p.m. to 8:15 p.m. EDT. Backup test dates run through June 5. Completion of the test will be noted on the Wallops’ Facebook and Twitter sites. During the test, the upgraded Antares dual RD-181 rocket engines will fire for 30 seconds at maximum 100% power (thrust) while the first stage of the test rocket will be held down on the pad. The hot fire will demonstrate the readiness of the rocket’s first stage and the launch pad fueling systems to support upcoming flights.
If all goes well, they hope to launch Antares with a Cygnus capsule in early July.
Brownshirts: Protesters (who were admitted Bernie Sanders supporters) crashed the stage, grabbed the mike, and threatened the speakers at a conservative event at DePaul University last night.
The security guards, required by the university and partly paid for by the people running the event, refused to do anything.
After an extended period of time, the crowd started to chant “Do your job” at security, who remained at the back of the venue for the entire event. When security refused to intervene, Yiannopoulos posed for pictures with fans in the audience, and ordered the crowd to follow him to the college president’s office.
More details, including video, at the link.
The European Southern Observatory today signed the contract to begin building the European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT).
The contract covers the design, manufacture, transport, construction, on-site assembly and verification of the dome and telescope structure. With an approximate value of 400 million euros, it is the largest contract ever awarded by ESO and the largest contract ever in ground-based astronomy. The E-ELT dome and telescope structure will take telescope engineering into new territory. The contract includes not only the enormous 85-metre-diameter rotating dome, with a total mass of around 5000 tonnes, but also the telescope mounting and tube structure, with a total moving mass of more than 3000 tonnes. Both of these structures are by far the largest ever built for an optical/infrared telescope and dwarf all existing ones. The dome is almost 80 metres high and its footprint is comparable in area to a football pitch.
The E-ELT is being built on Cerro Armazones, a 3000-metre peak about 20 kilometres from ESO’s Paranal Observatory. The access road and leveling of the summit have already been completed and work on the dome is expected to start on site in 2017.
E-ELT will have a main mirror 39 meters in width, about 9 meters bigger than the stalled TMT project.
Brown-shirts: Protesters at a Trump rally tonight in New Mexico threw rocks, broke windows, and blocked exits.
More here. and here. There were some reports of gunfire, but these appear to not be true. Regardless, it is unconscionable for these protesters to act this way. They might think the Trump is a fascist, but the only ones acting like fascists here are the protesters themselves.
There has been a lot of anger and passion during this presidential campaign, but so far almost all the violence has come from the left.
Embedded below the fold. Spent some time talking about the NASA budget, SLS, and the differences between SpaceX’s plans for Mars and Lockheed Martin’s.
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An evening pause: Hat tip George Petricko, who noted, “Just when you think the whole world has gone rotten, you see someone like this.” I say, this is just one more testament to what is possible if you are humble and do the best you can, with what you have.
The competition heats up: Orbital ATK today revealed plans to build what it calls the Next Generation Launcher designed to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
The first stage would use a variation of the solid rocket boosters that ATK built for the space shuttle. The second stage would be bought from Blue Origin.
The competition heats up: Iridium has announced the availability of its own location technology comparable to GPS and using the company’s constellation of satellites.
Iridium Communications Inc. has introduced its Satellite Time and Location (STL) service, an alternative or complement to traditional indoor and outdoor location-based technologies, and declared it ready for use. STL’s position, navigation and timing (PNT) technology is deployed through Iridium’s 66 cross-linked, low-earth orbit satellite constellation. Through Iridium satellites and in GNSS receivers, STL technology can work to verify GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and other navigation services, and also can serve as an alternative for those services when GPS signals are degraded or unavailable. STL also can provide an alternative source of time when testing GPS signals.
Essentially, for practically nothing, using satellites and technology already in orbit, they have created their own system that can both compete and complement the expensive government-built GPS systems.
The House appropriations committee has outlined its recommendations for NASA’s 2017 budget.
Like the Senate the House is pushing more money for SLS and is demanding NASA use it to fly two missions to Europa in the early 2020s (likely delaying SLS’s first manned mission), In addition, the House wants NASA to abandon any plans for an asteroid mission and instead go back to the Moon. They also pumped up the planetary program, and express reservations about the manned commercial program.
Finally, in a wonderful example of congressional micro-managing, the committee ordered NASA to begin work on flying an interstellar mission to Alpha Centauri by the 100th anniversary of Apollo 11.
While some of the changes the committee is recommending (increasing planetary research funding for example) make sense, the overall priorities of Congress continue to appear to me to be misplaced. Their continuing emphasis on SLS while questioning commercial space illustrates their focus on pork rather than actual accomplishments. And their continuing effort to micromanage many NASA missions does not bode well for the success of those missions.
There is one takeaway from this House budget recommendation that most news sources are missing: The first manned flight of Orion is almost certainly not flying in 2021. I have seen numerous indicators in the past four months suggesting that NASA is going to delay it, and this budget recommendation’s insistence that NASA use SLS to fly Europa missions in 2022 and 2024 almost guarantees that delay.
Does this make you feel safer? The TSA has replaced its head of security.
They didn’t fire him, only replaced him with another political hack who will likely do as bad a job. Meanwhile, the guy they removed will be given another job where he can screw up in a different way.
Cool image time! The New Horizons science team has released an image taken during the spacecraft’s fly-by of Pluto in July 2015 showing what they are calling “fretted terrain”.
The image above is a cropped reduced section of that image. It shows the strange transition zone between the higher elevation bright areas and the lower dark plains. As they note,
New Horizons scientists haven’t seen this type of terrain anywhere else on Pluto; in fact, it’s rare terrain across the solar system – the only other well-known example of such being Noctis Labyrinthus on Mars. The distinct interconnected valley network was likely formed by extensional fracturing of Pluto’s surface. The valleys separating the blocks may then have been widened by movement of nitrogen ice glaciers, or flowing liquids, or possibly by ice sublimation at the block margins.
In other words, they really don’t know what is going on.
