Category: Behind The Black

Orbital ATK to launch first Minotaur-C in six and a half years

8:25 am

Capitalism in space: Orbital ATK will try today to successfully launch its renamed Taurus rocket, six and a half years after its previous two launches had ended in failure.

The rocket is now called Minotaur-C and will attempt to launch ten Planet Lab smallsats. As Taurus, the rocket failed 3 times out of 9 launches, and from what I could tell watching the launch industry, was basically a dead product. I am now astonished that it is coming back to life. Apparently, Planet Lab got a good launch price, and can take the risk since its smallsats represent a relatively small investment and can be replaced much more easily than the two research satellites (Orbiting Carbon Laboratory and Glory) that NASA lost in the rocket’s previous two launches more than half a decade ago.

The article outlines nicely the history of this rocket, and how its failures significantly set back the growth of Orbital ATK. Hopefully, it will succeed now, and provide the U.S. another player in the increasingly competitive global launch market.

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North Korea’s new plan to develop and launch satellites

12:16 am

North Korea announced yesterday a new program to accelerate the development of home-built space satellites and orbital rockets.

North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun published a commentary laying out the country’s plans to send more satellites into space over the next five years. The program “can contribute to improving the economy and people’s lives,” the article reads. “It is a global trend to seek economic development through space programs,” the October 31 piece said. “According to our five-year plan for space development, we will launch more working satellites, such as geostationary ones.” Geostationary satellites orbit the Earth about 38,500 kilometers (22,000 miles) over a fixed position over the equator and revolve from west to east like the Earth.

It is hard to know how realistic this program is, and how much of it is actually a cover for North Korea’s ICBM development efforts.

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Saudi Arabia gives robot citizenship

10:36 am

As part of a publicity stunt to encourage investment, Saudi Arabia has given citizenship to a new robot, designed to show human emotions by facial expressions.

A humanoid robot took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative yesterday and had an amusing exchange with the host to the delight of hundreds of delegates. Smartphones were held aloft as Sophia, a robot designed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, gave a presentation that demonstrated her capacity for human expression.

Sophia made global headlines when she was granted Saudi citizenship, making the kingdom the first country in the world to offer its citizenship to a robot.

Below the fold I have embedded the video of Sophia’s conversation with the host. It is obvious that most of the conversation was scripted. It is also obvious that robots still have a long way to go before their facial expressions appear natural to the human eye.

Posted north of Phoenix as we climb up onto the Colorado Plateau. Just saw the last saguaro in the cacti’s northern range limits.
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Chinese company gives live turtle a high altitude balloon flight

9:00 am

Capitalism in space: Chinese company has successful given a live turtle a high altitude balloon flight as prep for future tourism flights.

The news article is somewhat humorous in claiming the following:

Shenzhen-based Kuang-Chi Group said it blasted the yellow-headed turtle, nicknamed “Little Cloud”, to an altitude of 21,000 metres inside a helium-filled craft. The launch took place from western China’s Xinjiang region at about 4am on Wednesday morning.

The craft landed safely at about 8.28am the same day, and the turtle was said to have survived the trip.

The company said it was the first time a live animal had been safely taken into near space, and that the trip paved the way for it to sell commercial flights to humans by 2018 or 2019. [emphasis mine]

The company’s claim, highlighted above, is so incredibly not true it raises questions about their whole story. Humans have been taken by balloon to these elevations several times. This might be a poor translation, but then it indicates some incompetence by the reporter.

Either way, this company is aiming for the high altitude tourism market that World View in Tucson had initially been focusing on, but now seems to have abandoned.

Posted as we slog our way through Phoenix traffic.

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SpaceX to resume launches at second launchpad in December

8:18 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX plans to resume launches in December at its second Kennedy launchpad that was damaged in the September 2016 explosion.

This means that after the mid-November launch of Northrop Grumman’s Zuma payload, they will begin the reconfiguration of that launchpad for Falcon Heavy. Initially the company had said it would take two months to complete that work, which would push the first Falcon Heavy launch into 2018. More recently they say they can get the work done in six weeks. Either way, this suggests that the first attempt to launch Falcon Heavy around the first of the year.

Posted on the road from Tucson to the Grand Canyon. This weekend I am running a new cave survey project there, and we are hiking down this afternoon, with the plan to hike out on Monday.]

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Survey finds universities teach a “thin and patchy education”

11:41 am

The coming dark age: A national survey has found that today’s universities no longer teach a well-rounded education but instead allow their students to skip important subjects so that their education is “thin and patchy.”

The group evaluated more than 1,100 colleges and universities based on their requirements in seven “key areas of knowledge”: composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. history, economics, mathematics and science. The results showed that 66.5 percent of the schools required only three or fewer of those subjects.

This leads to a “thin and patchy education,” the report states. “Students may have dozens or even hundreds of courses from which to choose, many of them highly specialized niche courses,” it states. “Once distribution requirements become too loose, students almost inevitably graduate with an odd list of random, unconnected courses and, all too often, serious gaps in their basic skills and knowledge.”

Additional key findings include that fewer than 18 percent of colleges and universities require a foundational course in U.S. government or history, and only about 3 percent of the institutions require students to take a basic economics class.

Read it all. It is quite depressing, but also not surprising. It also suggests that parents and their high school children need to demand more from colleges, and reject those colleges that are failing in providing the basics of a college education.

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An ancient ocean on Ceres?

10:03 am

Two studies released today by the Dawn science team suggest that the spacecraft has found evidence that an ancient ocean once existed on Ceres.

In one study, the Dawn team found Ceres’ crust is a mixture of ice, salts and hydrated materials that were subjected to past and possibly recent geologic activity, and this crust represents most of that ancient ocean. The second study builds off the first and suggests there is a softer, easily deformable layer beneath Ceres’ rigid surface crust, which could be the signature of residual liquid left over from the ocean, too.

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Trump Justice Department settles lawsuits over Obama IRS harassment

9:49 am

The Trump administration has come to a settlement with the lawsuits filed by tea party groups over their harassment by the IRS during the Obama administration.

The government apologized Thursday for illegally targeting tea party groups for intrusive scrutiny and agreed to settlements with hundreds of organizations snared in the targeting, bringing to a close one of the more embarrassing episodes of the Obama administration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the IRS owed the groups an apology after years of poor treatment and even longer refusal to concede bad behavior. He placed blame on “the last administration,” saying the targeting that went on under President Obama “was wrong and should never have occurred.”

One of the settlement agreements, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., officially admits that the IRS singled out groups because of their political beliefs, in defiance of the law. The other settlement, in a class-action lawsuit in Ohio, includes a “generous” payout to more than 400 groups snared, according to a lawyer involved.

The amount of the settlement was not released.

Meanwhile, John Koskinen remains head of the IRS, despite a long documented record of stone-walling and obstruction of justice. If the Trump administration is really sincere about fixing this proglem so that it won’t happen again, why has Trump not fired him?

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Scientists propose adding smog to atmosphere to fight global warming

9:44 am

What could possibly go wrong? Global warming scientists have proposed injecting sulphate aerosols (another name for pollution) into the upper atmosphere in order to counter their predicted global temperature rise.

Experts are considering ploughing sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere which would cause some of the suns rays to be reflected back out into space. This could potentially cool the Earth down and help counter the effects of climate change, scientists say.

The move would also help reduce coral bleaching and help calm powerful storms.

James Crabbe, from the University of Bedfordshire, is leading the study and his initial results suggest the plan could help cool the planet.

This proposal is based on such flimsy science it appalls me that any scientist would even consider it, especially when you think about the unknown consequences.

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Rosetta’s capture of a dust jet from Comet 67P/C-G

9:26 am

Dust jet on Comet 67P/C-G

Cool image time! The Rosetta science team has released images and data gathered in July 2016 when the spacecraft successfully observed a dust outburst erupting from Comet 67P/C-G’s surface. The image on the right, slightly reduced in resolution, shows that outburst.

When the Sun rose over the Imhotep region of Rosetta’s comet on July 3, 2016, everything was just right: As the surface warmed and began to emit dust into space, Rosetta’s trajectory led the probe right through the cloud. At the same time, the view of the scientific camera system OSIRIS coincidentally focused precisely on the surface region of the comet from which the fountain originated. A total of five instruments on board the probe were able to document the outburst in the following hours.

As should be expected, the results did not match the models or predictions. The jet, instigated by water-ice just below the surface turning into gas when heated by the Sun, was much dustier than predicted. They have theories as to why, but it appears that no one likes these theories that much.

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More hints that the first SLS launch will be delayed again

9:17 am

Government in action! The head of the Marshall Space Flight Center yesterday once again hinted that the first unmanned launch of SLS/Orion, presently scheduled for late in 2019, could be delayed again.

In September, the agency said in a statement that it would announce a new target date for EM-1 in October, citing the need to account for a range of issues, including progress on the European-built Orion service module and shutdowns at NASA centers from hurricanes in August and September.

However, an update in October is increasingly unlikely. “Within a few weeks, I think [NASA Acting Administrator Robert Lightfoot] intends to codify whatever that date is going to be,” Todd May, director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, said in remarks at the American Astronautical Society’s Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium here Oct. 25.

Bill Hill, deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development at NASA, offered a similar assessment. “Probably in the next month, maybe sooner,” he said in an interview.

These hints have been standard operating procedure for announcing SLS’s endless delays for the past decade. First they make hints that a delay might happen, but reassure everyone that it is very unlikely. Then they follow this up later with announcements about how they need more time to accomplish all their goals. By the third announcement they outline a possible new schedule, including some delay but insist that it isn’t likely. Finally, they release the new dates, often as an aside during some other announcement in order to minimize the news.

It should be noted that the new dates have almost never been realistic. NASA has usually known that the new dates are interim, and that further delays will likely require more of this same dance to make them public.

So, here is my prediction: They are preparing us for the fact that the first unmanned flight will likely slip into 2020, which means the first manned flight slips for certain into 2023, as I have been predicting for the past three years.

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Saudi Arabia to invest $1 billion in Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: Saudi Arabia and Virgin have signed a non-binding agreement for Saudi Arabia to invest $1 billion in Virgin Galactic and Virgin Orbit.

I’m not sure what to make of this press release. The agreement is clearly called “non-binding,” which means Saudi Arabia is not obliged to provide any funds. At the same time, the deal appears to shift power and control of the two Virgin companies to the Arab country, which if successful (a big “if”) would also quickly give Saudi Arabia both a manned and smallsat launching capability.

Why they chose Virgin appears at first baffling, considering that company’s repeated inability to achieve any of its promises. It could be, however, that Richard Branson’s funds are drying up, and that he needed this deal to keep both companies afloat. Saudi Arabia thus saw an opportunity and grabbed it.

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Boeing’s Starliner undergoing drop tests

8:53 am

Capitalism in space: Boeing’s Starliner manned capsule yesterday successfully completed the 11th of 14 drop tests in preparation for launch.

The article includes extensive comments by two NASA astronauts who are working with Boeing on these drop tests. I found this quote interesting:

[Sunita] Williams and [Eric] Boe said there are benefits and drawbacks to either type of landing, but they preferred land over water. Williams speaks from experience: She has already made a land landing aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. “When you land on land, maybe it’s a little bit harder,” Williams said. “But when you’re coming down at high speed, the water’s hard, too.

“Landing on water, if somebody’s right there to rescue you and they know exactly where you’re coming down, that works. And we’ve shown that works with the Apollo program. But, landing on water — I’m a Navy guy, there’s a big ocean out there and it’s a little space capsule and there’s some definite risks to that, too.

“Landing on the Soyuz, you open the hatch, you smell the grass, you’re not in a huge rush to get out or stay in. You know you’re in a solid place and you know you can take your time getting out and the rescue forces will be there eventually, if they’re not there knocking on the door.”

The article also noted that Boeing plans to refurbish each capsule and reuse it up to ten times.

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