Category: Points of Information

Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.

Sunspot update: February activity declines to predicted values

3:51 pm

Time to do another sunspot update. Below is NOAA’s March 1, 2021 monthly graph, showing the Sun’s monthly sunspot activity. It is annotated by me as always to show the previous solar cycle predictions.

February continued the decline of sunspot activity seen in January after a very unusually active November and December. Though the actual sunspot number was more than the prediction, the difference in February was trivial.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: McDonald’s aggressively discriminating against white men

1:16 pm

They’re coming for you next: McDonald’s has now established policies that will require firm statistical hiring quotas for its top management jobs aimed at discriminating against white men and favoring minorities, regardless of qualifications.

A press release on the McDonald’s website says that part of the bonuses awarded to top company executives will be based upon their efforts to hire women and what the company terms “historically underrepresented groups” for top corporate positions.

“Beginning in 2021, the Company is incorporating quantitative human capital management-related metrics to annual incentive compensation for its Executive Vice Presidents,” the company said. “In addition to the Company’s financial performance, executives will be measured on their ability to champion our core values, improve representation within leadership roles for both women and historically underrepresented groups, and create a strong culture of inclusion within the Company,” the company said.

Other reports indicate that an executive’s annual bonuses could be penalized by as much as 15% if he or she fails to meet these goals.

In other words, if you don’t favor women and minorities in your promotions and hiring, discriminating specifically against white men merely because of their sex and race, your bonuses will be reduced.

Nor is this policy of racial discrimination limited to the company’s top management.

The company’s diversity website notes that in America, 70 percent of those hired in 2019 were women (54 percent) or minorities (33 percent).

The company was even more focused on non-white, non-male applicants through its University program in 2019–2020, with 81 percent of those admitted being women or minorities.

All of these policies are 100% illegal based on all of the civil rights laws passed in the past half century. Period. The law forbids you to consider race, religion, creed, or sex in your hiring and promotion practices.

No matter. When it comes to oppressing some races and sexes the law no longer matters. What matters is punishing today’s innocent generation for the sins of long dead past generations.

So, remember this the next time you stop for a hamburger. Your money will be supporting an inherently racist company which determines who it will hire and promote not by their talent, skills, and performance, but by their race and sex. According to McDonald’s the quality of a person’s character be damned!

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Cave boxwork on the Martian surface

12:50 pm

Boxwork in Wind Cave on Earth
Boxwork inside Wind Cave, South Dakota, mere inches across.

Anyone who has ever visited either Wind or Jewel caves in South Dakota has likely seen some wonderful examples of the cave formation boxwork, formed when the material in cracks is more resistant to erosion that the surrounding bedrock, which once eroded away leaves behind the criss-crossing ridges seen in the picture to the right.

Today’s cool image provides us what appears to be an example of boxwork on Mars. However, unlike on Earth it is not in a cave but on the surface. It is also much larger. Instead of the ridges being almost paper thin and stretching for inches or feet, this Martian boxwork is feet wide with ridges extending hundreds of feet in size, as shown by today’s cool image below.
» Read more

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Rocket Lab to build new bigger rocket

9:05 am

Capitalism in space: As part of its announcement yesterday that Rocket Lab is going to become a publicly traded stock, the company also announced it is going to develop a new larger rocket, dubbed Neutron, to supplement its smaller Electron rocket.

The second link provides some additional details about Neutron.

Today, Monday, 1 March, the company revealed its “Neutron” rocket, a medium-class launch vehicle that can lift up to 8,000 kilograms (eight tonnes) into orbit, comparable to Russia’s Soyuz rocket. The two-stage vehicle will be 40 meters (131 feet) tall, more than double the company’s existing Electron rocket, which measures 18 meters (60 feet) tall and has so far flown 97 satellites across 18 launches.

They will design it to be human-rated from the start, and will also have the first stage land vertically using its engines so it can be reused. According to video from the company, they are aiming for a ’24 launch date.

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Update on ISS leaks: Several to be drilled & sealed over next 5 days

8:44 am

According to Russia’s state news service, astronauts on ISS have located several leaks in the 20-year-old Zvezda module of ISS, and will spend the next five days fixing them.

This report clarifies a previous report that left more questions than it answered. It appears that there are several leaks that were found using a microscope sent to the station and temporarily sealed. Now the goal in the next five days will be to permanently seal them.

[A] hole will be drilled at one of the fracture’s ends, which will be filled with cold welding and sealed with a fluoroplastic film on top. The same procedure will be done with other holes. After that, the surface will be sanded and wiped with alcohol wipes and covered with a sealant. Overall, the cosmonauts will put three layers of the sealant.

The repair method suggests that they are all cracks. To stop a crack from growing you drill out the end.

That they are all cracks further suggests that these are all stress fractures. Thus, no matter how permanent these particular repairs are, they cannot solve the greater problem of the aging module itself. We should expect more cracks to appear in the future unless something more drastic is done.

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Booster landing failure on Feb 15 Falcon 9 launch began with engine issue during lift-off

8:37 pm

SpaceX revealed today that the failure on February 15th of the 1st stage of the Falcon 9 rocket to land successfully first appeared during liftoff.

During a NASA press conference March 1 about the upcoming Crew-2 commercial crew flight, Benji Reed, senior director for human spaceflight programs at SpaceX, said that while the booster used on that Feb. 15 launch was making its sixth flight, some components on it were “life leaders” that had flown more often than any other in the Falcon 9 fleet. That included “boots,” or covers around parts of the Merlin engines in the first stage. “This was the highest count number of flights that this particular boot design had seen,” he said.

However, one of those boots had a “little bit of a hole” that allowed hot gas to get into parts of the engine during flight, he said. “A little bit of hot gas got to where it’s not supposed to be, and it caused that engine to shut down,” he said. Reed didn’t mention at what point in the launch the engine shut down, but he suggested it took place during ascent.

…The shutdown of the engine, though, kept the first stage from landing. “When that booster came to return home, because of the problem with that particular engine, we didn’t have enough thrust to get back to where we needed to be, and didn’t land where we wanted to be,” he said.

These facts help explain why SpaceX paused all its subsequent flights. An issue during liftoff is more serious than one that occurs during the return to Earth, as it suggests a problem that could impact future launches and the ability of the rocket to deliver its payload, its primary task.

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State legislatures proposing repeals of 2020 election revisions that made fraud easy

1:46 pm

I’ll believe it when I see it: The state legislatures of Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — all strongly controlled by Republicans — are now considering numerous proposals to repeal the many improvised revisions to state election laws that made fraud easy and contributed to the widespread belief of many that the 2020 presidential election was stolen by the Democrats.

Significant legislative attempts are underway in multiple U.S. states, including key battleground states, to roll back major changes in voting rules and regulations to various pre-2020 status quo antes. The efforts come after an historically chaotic election process that has left millions of Americans doubtful of election fairness, security, transparency and accountability.

Changes to election rules — some of them enacted prior to 2020 and others put in place in response to the COVID-19 pandemic last year — have included expansive mail-in voting, expanded early voting, relaxation of verification rules, and extensions to ballot receipt deadlines.

Those rules likely contributed to a record 158,000,000-plus votes cast in the 2020 election. But the relaxation of various voting requirements has also led to significant distrust in the election system: Nearly 40% of voters believe that U.S. elections are beset by fraud, while a similar number claim that such concerns haven’t been properly vetted by public authorities.

As far as I am concerned, until these changes are actually imposed and enforced, stories like this are nothing more than another example of Republican Party failure theater: lots of big talk that means nothing.

And if you sense a bit of contempt for these Republicans, you are not mistaken. I have watched them stand by impotently for decades as the the principles of freedom and individual rights that this country stands for were trampled upon and nullified, step-by-step by the corrupt and power-hungry Democratic Party. Why should I hold any respect for them?

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Today’s blacklisted American: Bi-racial make-up artist fired for singing a rap song as requested by black actor

1:00 pm

They’re coming for you next: An experienced bi-racial make-up artist was immediately fired from a new Amazon television project for simply singing a rap song — with the black actress who had suggested it and had joined in — that happened to contain the evil N-word that must never be spoken.

Earlier this month, Page Six reported that the artist in question was canned from the “Untitled Tracy Oliver Project” — the new show from the “Girls Trip” creator dubbed the “Black Sex and the City” — for allegedly saying the N-word repeatedly in front of one of the show’s lead actresses, while singing along with a rap song. (We know both the name of the actress and the makeup artist, but we aren’t going to print them due to the sensitivity of the situation. The makeup artist is a veteran of many major TV shows and movies.)

Now Page Six is told that her peers are outraged that the artist was fired for using the word — especially, we’re told, because the makeup artist is biracial.

Her union has done nothing to help this artist, though it graciously decided not to pursue charges against her. How nice of them.

I also do not have much respect for the so-called outrage of the artist’s “peers.” They only care because of her race. If the artist had been white and done the same, inspired by the black artist, I don’t believe they’d care at all. In the modern leftist culture that these people are seeped in the only thing that matters is race. If you have the right minority race, you can do no wrong. If you don’t, your rights are forfeit, and instead you must bow like a slave to that culture.

This is also par for the course for Amazon, which is enthusiastically embracing blackballing for petty and political reasons, almost always against conservatives or anyone who criticizes their leftist racist identity politics.

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Biden fires Boeing on SLS; gives job to Acme

12:41 pm

In an interesting announcement today, the Biden administration fired Boeing as the prime contractor for SLS and gave the job to a well-known southwest company dubbed Acme.

Anticipating critical comment, White House spokesmen pointed out that Acme had a long history of use of solid-fuel rockets for crewed applications, “without loss of human life or serious injury” despite some less-than-fatal mishaps.

…The spokesperson also added, “It should be noted that Acme’s products have never killed anybody. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for Boeing.”

Before you comment, make sure you read the article at the link closely, and also click on the two links in the article to get some detailed background on Acme, from some original sources.

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A deep south Martian dune with bright patches

12:21 pm

Dune with bright patches
Click for full image.

Cool image time! Last week the MRO science team posted a new captioned image entitled “Bright and Dark Dunes” featuring a particularly large single dune in the floor of a 25-mile-wide unnamed crater located at about 68 degrees south latitude. The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and color enhanced to post here, shows that dune. According to the caption, written by Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona,

This image shows a large sand dune with bright patches. Martian dunes near the poles often have bright patches in the spring, when seasonal frost is lingering. However, this image is from late summer, when frost is long gone. What is going on here?

A close-up look with [MRO’s high resolution camera] provides some clues. The bright patches are made up of large ridges that look like wind-blown bedforms. Additionally, the bright patches are yellowish in the infrared-red-blue image. In enhanced color, most sand on Mars is blue but dust is yellow. This suggests that the bright bedforms are either built from, or covered by, dust or material with a different composition.

Thus, the bright patches reveal either aspect of the dune’s underlying structure, either inherent in the bedrock itself, or the texture of its surface that allows it to hold more dust. As Dundas adds, “I think more study would be needed to determine the answer in this particular case.”

There are other aspects of this dune that can be seen by a look at the wider view afforded by MRO’s context camera below.
» Read more

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Looking into one of Jupiter’s smaller cyclones

9:47 am

A northern cyclone on Jupiter
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken by the Juno probe orbiting Jupiter and enhanced first by citizen scientist Kenneth Gill and then further enhanced by citizen scientist Navaneeth Krishnan.

Sadly all the link tells us about this storm is that it is in the northern hemisphere. Based upon the colors, my guess is that it located at the high latitude where Jupiter’s bands transition to the chaotic region of storms at the poles, as seen in this earlier wide image of the gas giant’s south pole.

No scale is provided, but an earlier image of other northern hemisphere storms suggests this storm would probably cover the state of Arizona.

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SpaceX: No 1st stage footage on tonight’s Starlink launch

9:22 am

During last night’s short broadcast leading to the abort at T-1:24 seconds of a launch of another 60 Starlink satellites, the company announced that it would not show the video feed from the reused first stage booster as it returned to Earth.

[A] SpaceX engineer revealed that the company would not be broadcasting live feeds from Falcon 9 B1049’s onboard cameras during the launch. The ambiguity of the comment made it impossible to determine if SpaceX was simply choosing to not show those views or if something was wrong with the camera downlink system, while the same engineer-turned-host did go on to state that “all systems are green” moments later.

No explanation for the sudden change – possibly the first webcast in years without live views from booster cameras – was given. Starlink-17 serves as a return-to-flight mission for SpaceX after Starlink-19’s failed landing, during which the rocket’s onboard cameras streamed what appeared to be clearly unusual and possibly off-nominal behavior early on in the landing process.

The article at the link then speculates that maybe SpaceX was worried about that booster’s ability to land (it will be flying its eighth time, same as the booster that failed on the earlier flight).

I am very skeptical of that theory, especially because SpaceX has never shown a reluctance to show the public its failures. Instead, I think SpaceX has decided to do an engineering test of that booster during its return, and for propriety reasons wants to keep this from public eyes. If so, the test itself might also mean they are willing to lose this booster during that test.

During the early days of their program to reuse boosters, they sometimes had the returning 1st stage do some very stressful maneuvers, producing very spectacular light shows when launched from Vandenberg on the California coast. It could be they want to test this older booster on its eighth flight in a similar manner, in order to reassess their engineering and thus make it possible to upgrade and extend the re-usability of later boosters.

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Rocket Lab about to go public

9:07 am

Capitalism in space: According to news reports today, the smallsat rocket company Rocket Lab is about to sign a deal that will make it a publicly traded stock in a merger with a venture capital company.

The Wall Street Journal reported today talks between the company and Vector Acquisitions Corp were nearing completion and could be finalised with 24 hours, and was expected to see Rocket Lab raise another $650 million in cash from other private investors.

Vector is a special-purpose acquisition company, a vehicle that recruits investors and lists before pursuing a business to buy. Vector, backed by tech private equity firm Vector Capital, raised $400m on launch in September.

Rocket Lab is one of a cluster of spaceflight operators jostling for global market share in the smaller-launch market, where the focus is on achieving reliable delivery of small cargoes to lower earth orbits. Any listing would catapult Rocket Lab – whose Mahia spaceport has delivered nearly 100 satellites into orbit – into the top rank of New Zealand companies, and represents a huge blow for the local NZX. With a valuation of $5.7b, it would have ranked as one the 10 largest companies on the national exchange.

According to Rocket Lab, it is not a New Zealand company but based in the U.S., despite the bulk of its operations being in New Zealand.

I will not be surprised it Rocket Lab’s stock price quickly rises once available for purchase. Unlike Virgin Galactic, this is a real company with a real product producing real profits. It is also very well placed to garner a healthy share in the emerging launch market of smallsats that is now arriving on the scene. The company is about to initiate launches from its second launchpad at Wallops Island in the U.S., which will also allow it to finally accelerate its launch pace to the promised twice a month pace it has been promising for the last two years.

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India & Russia successfully launch satellites

11:04 pm

Both India and Russia today successfully launched satellites into orbit.

For India it was their first launch in 2021. Their PSLV rocket put into orbit a Brazillian satellite for studying Earth resources. The launch also included 18 other cubesats.

Russia in turn used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a new generation weather satellite for studying that country’s remote Arctic regions.

SpaceX had also planned another Starlink launch but aborted the countdown with just over a minute to go. They plan to try again tomorrow.

The 2021 launch race:

5 SpaceX
4 China
3 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Virgin Orbit
1 Northrop Grumman
1 India

The U.S. still leads China 8 to 4 in the national rankings.

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Astra wins three-launch contract from NASA

8:59 am

Capitalism in space: Astra, which as yet not achieved its first orbital launch, has won a three-launch contract from NASA valued at just under $8 million.

Astra, the Alameda-based space launch startup that recently announced its intent to go public via a SPAC merger, has secured a contract to deliver six cube satellites to space on behalf of NASA. Astra stands to be paid $7.95 million by the agency for fulfilment of the contract. This will be a key test of Astra’s responsive rocket capabilities, with a planned three-launch mission profile spanning up to four months, currently targeting sometime between January 8 and July 31 of 2022.

There is no word on when the first flight of its rocket, dubbed Rocket, will occur. The company has completed two test launches, with the second nearly making orbit.

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Military admits F-35 is impossible to use, expensive, and an utter failure

3:45 pm

Another typical federal project: The military has now admitted that Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet, a decades-long project to replace the F-16, is an utter failure and must be replaced.

The list of basic problems with the jet are truly appalling.

In spite of its advanced technology and cutting-edge capabilities, the latest stealth fighter suffers from structural flaws and slew of challenges.

Most recent among them is a structural engine flaw and shortage in its production. The F-35’s engine problem is partly based in not being able to deliver them for maintenance as fast as needed, in addition to a problem with the heat coating on its rotor blades which shortens engine lifespan considerably. Defense News described it as a “serious readiness problem”, suggesting that as soon as 2022, nearly 5 to 6 per ent of the F-35 fleet could be effectively grounded as it waits for engine replacements.

Another challenge is the plane’s software. Most modern fighter jets have between 1 to 2 million lines of code in their software. The F-35 averages 8 million lines of code in its software, and it’s suffering from a bug problem. To fix this, the US Department of Defense is asking three American universities to help figure it out.

The fighter jet also suffers from a slightly embarrassing touchscreen problem. After making the switch from hard flipped switches to touch screens, pilots report that unlike a physical switch that you’re confident has been activated, touch screens in the plane don’t work 20 percent of the time says one F-35 pilot.

The worst part of this story is that this kind of incompetence has been par for the course for big federal projects like this for decades. Our government in Washington is corrupt and unqualified to even be dog catcher, but we voters don’t seem to have the courage to fire them. We certainly don’t fire the politicians who appear quite willing to encourage this corruption.

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Study: Only 10% chance of catching COVID from infected person within household

3:09 pm

Holy moley! A new study of more than 7,000 households in Boston with at least one infected person has found that there is only 10% chance that another member of the household will become infected also.

US researchers analysed data from more than 7,000 homes in Boston and found more than 25,000 people lived there between March 4 and May 17, 2020. In this time frame 7,262 people caught Covid but they only passed it on to a further 1,809 people they lived with, a transmission rate of 10.1 per cent.

The paper also found the likelihood of passing the virus on to someone you live with was lower for bigger hosueholds. For example, someone in a home with three to five people — one of whom was infected — was 20 per cent less at risk than a two-person house.

The study also found that infection was closely correlated with other illnesses. If you had other health issues, such asthma, cancer, were overweight, or had liver disease your chances of getting infected rose significantly.

This report is consistent with other research, that has found infection rates in households ranged from 16.6 to 19.5 percent. All tell us that even if you spend a lot of time with someone infected, if you are healthy your risk of catching COVID is relatively low. And if you are healthy your chances are dying are almost nil.

So I ask: When you are out hiking by yourself in the great outdoors, why the heck are you wearing a mask? And why do you stupidly put one on when you might pass someone else five feet away for about two seconds? Are you that fearful of life?

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Today’s blacklisted American: The pioneers who settled the west

12:28 pm

The Oklahoma Land Rush: cancelled
The Oklahoma Land Rush, wiped from history.

They’re coming for you next: A local community college in Oklahoma has removed a monument that commemorated the pioneers who settled the state in the 1800s because some people complained it was “not inclusive.”

The monument depicted the Oklahoma land run of 1889, which occurred on the day the U.S. government opened Oklahoma up to homesteaders for settlement. Apparently, there were complaints about this depiction on social media (which usually translates as a Twitter mob) as well as threats of violence. The college’s response to these mob threats?
» Read more

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Skiing dry ice boulders on Mars, captured in action!

11:26 am

Grooves in dune created by sliding dry ice blocks
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image is an update on a previous cool image published in April 2020 about how scientists believe the grooves seen on the slope of a giant dune in Russell Crater on Mars are believed to be formed by frozen blocks of carbon dioxide sliding down the slope when spring arrives. The photo to the right, taken on March 3, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and rotated and cropped to post here, shows these grooves. As I wrote then,

Because the block is sublimating away, the gas acts as a lubricant so that it can slide down the hill. If large enough, the dry ice block will stop at the base of the hill to disappear in a small pit. If small enough, it actually might completely vaporize as it slides, explaining the grooves that appear to gradually fade away.

The scientists actually did a test on Earth, buying a dry ice block at a grocery store and releasing it at the top of a desert dune. Go to my April 2020 link above to see the very cool video.

Several planetary scientists did further combing through many MRO photos of this dune and now think they have spotted examples where the camera actually captured a block as it was sliding downhill.
» Read more

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Virgin Galactic delays its next suborbital flight again

9:04 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic announced yesterday that it is now delaying the next manned flight of its suborbital Unity spaceship in order to address what appear to be still unresolved technical problems that almost caused the last manned flight to crash.

In an earnings call Feb. 25 timed to the release of its fourth quarter and full year 2020 financial results, company executives blamed an aborted test flight of SpaceShipTwo Dec. 12 on electromagnetic interference (EMI) that caused a flight computer to reboot just as the vehicle ignited its hybrid rocket engine. The vehicle glided to a safe landing at Spaceport America in New Mexico.

Mike Moses, president of Virgin Galactic, said a new flight control computer system is the likely source of increased levels of EMI. The company took steps to shield components from that interference to avoid a similar reboot and prepared to make a powered test flight as soon as Feb. 13. But in the final days of preparations, technicians noted continued EMI issues with vehicle systems.

The flight they had hoped to do this month has now been pushed back to May. They have also announced that then devote the rest of this year doing more test flights and will hold off any tourist flights until ’22.

Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said the company is sticking to the flight test program it announced last fall. The May flight will be followed by two more: one with two pilots and a “full cabin” of company employees to test the passenger cabin of the vehicle, followed by one with company founder Richard Branson on board. Colglazier said the company isn’t yet announcing specific dates for those flights, but expects both to take place this summer.

That will be followed by a flight for the Italian Air Force, confirming an agreement signed in October 2019. That flight will carry a set of research payloads and three Italian payload specialists, and generate revenue for the company. Colglazier said that flight would likely take place in late summer or early fall and generate revenue for the company, “and will conclude our product test program.”

The company also claims that its second SpaceShipTwo spacecraft will begin testing this summer.

We shall see. The track record of this company has been abysmal, and its been that way for almost two decades of non-achievement.

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Relativity touts next generation rocket before its first generation rocket has even launched

8:55 am

Capitalism in space: In an interview with CNBC the CEO of Relativity Space, Tim Ellis, pushed his company’s plans to develop a completely reusable rocket, dubbed the Terran-R, even though they have as yet completed even one test launch of their first rocket, the Terran-1.

Called Terran R, the reusable rocket is “really an obvious evolution” from the company’s Terran 1 rocket, Relativity CEO Tim Ellis told CNBC – the latter of which Relativity expects to launch for the first time later in 2021. “It’s the same architecture, the same propellant, the same factory, the same 3D printers, the same avionics and the same team,” Ellis said. “I’ve always been a huge fan of reusability. No matter how you look at it – even with 3D printing, and dropping the cost, and [increasing the] automation of a launch vehicle – making it reusable has got to be part of that future,” Ellis added.

Terran R is the first of several new initiatives that Ellis expects Relativity to unveil in the year ahead, with the company having raised more than $680 million since its founding five years ago. Just like Terran 1, Relativity will build Terran R with more than 90% of the parts through additive manufacturing – utilizing the world’s largest 3D printers as what Ellis calls “the factory of the future.”

Relativity, valued at $2.3 billion, ranks as one of the most valuable private space companies in the world. Its investors include Tiger Global Management, Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, Mark Cuban and more.

All well and good, but maybe before Ellis brags about his next generation rocket he might be better served to focus on getting that first rocket successfully off the ground later this year. It is a good thing his company is thinking of making its rockets reusable, but right now he is overselling while under-performing, a very bad sales technique. Better to do what Scotty of Star Trek did routinely, undersell while over-performing.
» Read more

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Starship #10 completes another static fire test after quick engine swap

4:44 pm

Starship #10 at 2nd static fire test
Screen capture from LabPadre live stream.

Capitalism in space: In what to me appears a remarkable tour de force, SpaceX today completed the second dress rehearsal countdown and static fire test of its tenth Starship prototype.

What made this a tour de force is that the previous test, only two days before, had found issues with one of the prototype’s three Raptor engines. In less than two days, SpaceX engineers were able to replace that engine and fire up the rocket again.

Compare that to the operations of Boeing and NASA in trying to do a single static fire test of SLS’s core stage. Preparations for the first test took months, and when this had an issue it is now going to take at least a month (if not more) before they can attempt a second test.

If today’s Starship static fire test came up clean with no problems, a test flight to about 30 to 40,000 feet could come as early as tomorrow.

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First launch of Blue Origin’s orbital rocket delayed to ’22

3:48 pm

Capitalism in space: In what had increasingly appeared likely in recent months, Blue Origin today announced that it is delaying the first launch of its orbital New Glenn rocket from late this year to sometime in ’22.

Blue Origin noted that the updated timeline follows the U.S. Space Force to stop its support for the New Glenn development effort as part of its procurement program for national security launches. That support, which could have added up to $500 million, was closed out at the end of last year.

The Space Force ended up choosing United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for the next round of national security launches. Jarrett Jones, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for New Glenn, told Space News that losing out on that round of launch contracts represented a $3 billion hit to anticipated revenue, and forced the company to “re-baseline” its development plans.

Personally I think this excuse is absurd. Jeff Bezos has been investing about $1 billion per year in Blue Origin. Moreover, in its announcement the company claimed it has invested $2.5 billion of that money in developing New Glenn. This is almost as much as SpaceX has raised to build Starship/Super Heavy, which is in development and in only about two years has already produced multiple prototypes and two test flights. Moreover, SpaceX developed Falcon Heavy for about a half billion dollars, and did it in less than seven years.

New Glenn has been in development for more than four years, and we have yet to even see it assembled in any form at all. The loss of that government military contract should have made no difference if Jeff Bezos and Blue Origin were really serious about building this rocket. He has given the company more than enough investment capital to get it done. They have just not delivered so far.

If I was Bezos, I would be taking a very hard look at the management at Blue Origin, with the intent to make some significant changes.

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Searching for ice in the Martian low latitudes

12:31 pm

Low latitude crater with intriguing debris on its floor
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image well illustrates the effort of planetary scientists to map out the range of buried ice on the Martian surface. Taken on December 13, 2020 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, it shows a 3.5-mile-wide crater located in the southern cratered highlands, but for those cratered highlands at the very high northern latitude of 24 degrees.

The black streaks on the crater’s interior slopes are probably slope streaks, but these are not the subject of this article. Instead, it is the material that covers the crater’s floor. These features resemble the glacial fill material that scientists have found widespread in the latitude bands between 30 to 60 degrees latitude. However, this crater is farther south, where such ice would not be stable and should have sublimated away.

Could there still be ice here? I emailed the scientist who requested the photo, Colin Dundas of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Arizona, and asked him what I was looking at. His answer:
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted Americans: Two educators in NYC fired for refusing to do Black Panther salute

11:53 am

They’re coming for you next: Two different educators in New York City, one Jewish and the other a Dominican-American who calls herself Afro-Latina, have been fired for refusing to do the Black Panther salute popularized by the Disney sci-fi 2018 movie, Black Panther.

The latter, Rafaela Espinal, was fired as head of the Community School District 12 in the Bronx and forced to take a demotion in order to save her retirement and health benefits. Not only did she refuse to do this salute because she believed it created a racial divide, she found the policies of New York’s Department of Education (DOE) particularly offensive and bigoted, as described in her $40 million lawsuit filed against New York’s DOE.
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Fellow DOE administrators also allegedly told Espinal she wasn’t “Black enough” and she should “just learn to be quiet and look pretty,” she claims in the $40 million suit.

Espinal, 50, claims racial fissures began to emerge in superintendent meetings in the fall of 2017, when some Black administrators would meet separately after the larger group’s monthly gatherings. Soon, only the birthdays of Black superintendents were recognized at official meetings, she claims.

The other educator, Karen Ames (who is also suing the DOE), experienced equally bigoted treatment before she was fired.
» Read more

11 comments

China commits to building its own SLS

9:16 am

The new colonial movement: China yesterday officially announced that it has approved construction of a heavy-lift rocket, dubbed Long March 9, that would by 2030 be able to put 140 tons into orbit.

The rocket is planned to have a lift capacity of 140 metric tons, with the capability of sending 50 or more tons into lunar orbit. It would be an immense vehicle, with a 10-meter diameter core and 5-meter side boosters. China would also like to eventually make the rocket, or at least part of it, reusable.

China is also developing another large rocket more comparable to the Falcon Heavy, though this other rocket has no name and information about it is more scarce.

Both projects indicate the long term commitment of the Chinese government to its space program. They also indicate that the present-day international competition to get into space is fueling far more development than the last forty years of international cooperation.

Whether these giant government rockets from China will be practical and efficient is an unanswered question. Just building something to compete is not the same thing as actually competing. The rockets have to be affordable, with the ability to launch frequently to make in-space exploration possible. If not, they will nothing more than big photo ops for incompetent politicians, kind of like SLS is for the U.S.

15 comments

Another detailed essay demanding SLS be cancelled

5:21 pm

Link here.

The analysis is detailed, thoughtful, thorough, and technical. It is worthwhile to read every word, slowly, carefully, and with an open-mind. The lead:

The SLS axiomatically cannot provide good value to the US taxpayer. In that regard it has already failed, regardless of whether it eventually manages to limp to orbit with a Falcon Heavy payload or two.

The question here is whether it is allowed to inflict humiliation and tragedy on the US public, who so richly deserve an actual legitimate launch program run by and for actual technical experts.

The best time to cancel SLS was 15 years ago. The second best time is now.

While this essay is brilliant, its real significance is that it is another data point in the growing sense I have that the Washington community is preparing itself for cancelling SLS at last. Such an essay would not have been written or paid attention to five years ago. I know. I wrote my own and got no traction.

Today attention is getting paid. More importantly, we are seeing a range of people and news organizations advocating similar anti-SLS positions, positions that would have been thought politically impossible only a few short years ago.

The clock is ticking on SLS. If any of its planned upcoming tests or flights fail, it will face a firestorm of hostility. And even if they succeed, its days appear numbered.

26 comments

Parker looks at Venus

2:57 pm

Venus as seen by the Parker Solar Probe
Click for full image.

During its July 2020 fly-by of Venus, the Parker Solar Probe used its wide field camera to snap a picture of the planet, cropped and reduced to post here on the right.

The photo surprised the scientists in that it apparently was able to detect some major surface features through Venus’ thick cloud cover.

WISPR is designed to take images of the solar corona and inner heliosphere in visible light, as well as images of the solar wind and its structures as they approach and fly by the spacecraft. At Venus, the camera detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet that may be nightglow — light emitted by oxygen atoms high in the atmosphere that recombine into molecules in the nightside. The prominent dark feature in the center of the image is Aphrodite Terra, the largest highland region on the Venusian surface. The feature appears dark because of its lower temperature, about 85 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius) cooler than its surroundings.

That aspect of the image took the team by surprise, said Angelos Vourlidas, the WISPR project scientist from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, who coordinated a WISPR imaging campaign with Japan’s Venus-orbiting Akatsuki mission. “WISPR is tailored and tested for visible light observations. We expected to see clouds, but the camera peered right through to the surface.”

“WISPR effectively captured the thermal emission of the Venusian surface,” said Brian Wood, an astrophysicist and WISPR team member from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. “It’s very similar to images acquired by the Akatsuki spacecraft at near-infrared wavelengths.”

This surprising observation sent the WISPR team back to the lab to measure the instrument’s sensitivity to infrared light. If WISPR can indeed pick up near-infrared wavelengths of light, the unforeseen capability would provide new opportunities to study dust around the Sun and in the inner solar system. If it can’t pick up extra infrared wavelengths, then these images — showing signatures of features on Venus’ surface — may have revealed a previously unknown “window” through the Venusian atmosphere.

The streaks in the picture come from cosmic rays.

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