Category: Points of Information

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

Rocket Lab successfully completes its first operational Electron launch

10:01 pm

Capitalism in space: Rocket Lab today successfully completed its first operational launch, the third Electron rocket launch attempt (two of which succeeded) and the second successful launch this year.

You can see a replay of the launch here. The payload was six smallsats and a “drag sail” designed to test technology for deorbiting satellites more efficiently.

They plan to follow with another launch in a month.

The leaders in the 2018 launch race remained unchanged:

31 China
17 SpaceX
10 Russia
8 ULA
8 Europe (Arianespace)

China continues to lead in the national rankings. Last year I initially counted Rocket Lab as an American company, but was convinced by others that it was better labeled as New Zealand, since the rocket was assembled and launched there, using a local team. I now have decided this is a mistake. The rocket is essentially American-made, and the company that markets it is American-based. It also plans to add an American launch site at Wallops Island. This is a tough call, but I have decided to change Rocket Lab back in my listings as an American launch company. This means China now leads the U.S. 31 to 28.

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Jupiter’s upper clouds

9:02 am

Jupiter's upper clouds

Cool image time! The photograph on the right, reduced to post here, was created by citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran from the raw images taken by Juno during the spacecraft’s 16th close fly-by of Jupiter on October 29, 2018. If you click on it you can see the full resolution image.

At the time, Juno was about 4,400 miles (7,000 kilometers) from the planet’s cloud tops, at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees north.

What attracts me to this image is its dimensionality. First, it looks at Jupiter from an oblique angle. Second, the shadows of the upper clouds can clearly be seen being cast on the lower clouds. Third, if you look at the full resolution image you can even see this effect in the middle of the big white storm in the image’s top left.

What frustrates me about this image is that Juno is not in an orbit around Jupiter allowing it to make extended movies of the evolution of these cloud features. Gaining even a limited understanding the meteorology of this gas giant will simply not be possible until we can do this, and that will require many satellites orbiting the planet.

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Watch Rocket Lab launch tonight

8:41 am

You can watch Rocket Lab’s launch of its smallsat Electron rocket tonight at 10 pm (Eastern) at Space.com, or at the company’s own website.

A lot hinges on the success of this launch. The company is gearing up to move to monthly and eventually weekly launches, but to do so it must still demonstrate it can launch successfully and with some regularity. If they succeed tonight, they plan to follow with another launch in a month.

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Europe picks landing site for its ExoMars 2020 rover

4:32 pm

The European Space Agency (ESA) has chosen the landing site for its ExoMars 2020 rover, a generally flat area with scattered craters dubbed Oxia Palum.

After over 4 years of careful study of HiRISE and more recently CaSSIS images Oxia Planum was chosen because scientists were convinced that its fine grained sediments, deposited during the ancient Noachian epoch were ideally suited for the Exobiology rover. With an enormous catchment area the sediments will have captured organics from a wide variety of environments over a long period of time, including areas where life may have existed. The fine sediments should also be ideal for the ExoMars drill – it aims to get to 2 metres depth.

Remote identification with the Mars Express and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Infrared spectrometers shows the presence of clays and other minerals giving clues to its aqueous history. A large group of scientists have been working on proposing, characterising and down selecting the sites, all of which had fascinating aspects, but Oxia Planum is the clear winner on both science and engineering constraints.

Based on my analysis of the last two candidate sites, I would guess that they also picked Oxia Planum because it is less spectacular, flatter, and thus poses less risk. It also means the images from there will be a bit more boring for the ordinary person.

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NASA approves Falcon 9 for all science missions

9:20 am

NASA today announced that it has certified SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket as qualified to launch all of its science missions.

With only one mission out of 61 flights of the Falcon 9 ending in failure, the rocket appears to have met the high standards NASA demands from all of the rockets it uses. Two of those successful missions include other flights under the LSP: Jason-3 and TESS.

With the addition of this latest notch on its belt, SpaceX is poised to conduct the most sensitive, in terms of cargo, flights that the agency has—those of astronauts to the International Space Station.

As noted in the quote, this certification makes it certain that NASA will allow its astronauts to fly on the Falcon 9, even if its own safety panel continues posing its bureaucratic demands.

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Florida shuttle runway gets license as spaceport

9:06 am

Capitalism in space: The runway at Cape Canaveral that was used for space shuttle landings has now received a license from the FAA to operate as a commercial spaceport.

The license allows the Cape Canaveral Spaceport to support operations of aircraft that carry an air-launched vehicle such as the Northrop Grumman Pegasus, Vulcan Systems’ Stratolaunch, Virgin Orbit Launcher One, Virgin Galactic Spaceship 2, potential new national security programs and others.

In a sense this makes this runway unique, in that unlike all other runways its primary focus is commercial space launches, not commercial airline traffic.

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“The world is watching us, remember.”

10:28 pm

Link here. An American man brings his Ukrainian wife to the United States for her first visit. Her impression will bring tears to your eyes.

And her husband’s impression?

The truth is, every American, each and every one of us, is privileged. We’re privileged because we are American.

If you don’t think so then lift your eyes to the horizon, over which exists a world where the overwhelming majority of humanity does not enjoy the self-evident entitlements we so flippantly take for granted—things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The more cynical among us will likely roll their eyes at the preceding sentence, writing it off as overwrought jingoism. But when hardship and war comprise your daily reality, you don’t take America’s greatness lightly, or for granted.

Whether we want it or not, we Americans have inherited an awesome responsibility. We are the caretakers of the promise of democracy for people around the world who yearn for it.

Of course, we’re not the only democracy in the world. But I’ve seen firsthand how the ideal of American democracy stands alone in the eyes of Ukraine’s soldiers, the Kurds in Iraq, or even octogenarian Tibetan freedom fighters. For them, America symbolizes a dream worth fighting for.

Remember. As Kennedy said, “We stand for freedom.” This means we have to defend it every day, even against our own neighbors and friends who have forgotten what freedom means.

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Parker survives first close solar fly-by

4:05 pm

The Parker Solar Probe has successfully survived its first close fly-by of the Sun.

Mission controllers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab received the status beacon from the spacecraft at 4:46 p.m. EST on Nov. 7, 2018. The beacon indicates status “A” — the best of all four possible status signals, meaning that Parker Solar Probe is operating well with all instruments running and collecting science data and, if there were any minor issues, they were resolved autonomously by the spacecraft.

At its closest approach on Nov. 5, called perihelion, Parker Solar Probe reached a top speed of 213,200 miles per hour, setting a new record for spacecraft speed. Along with new records for the closest approach to the Sun, Parker Solar Probe will repeatedly break its own speed record as its orbit draws closer to the star and the spacecraft travels faster and faster at perihelion.

It will be several weeks before they can download all the data gathered during this first fly-by.

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Leftist San Fran shuts down Airbnb business

12:15 pm

They’re coming for you next: The leftist government of San Francisco has forced the shut down of a chain of Airbnb rentals owned by a couple for violating the city’s many laws.

A San Francisco couple has been fined $2.25 million and ordered to not engage in listing their real estate properties on sites like Airbnb until 2025 for repeated violations of the city’s short term rental laws, the city attorney announced Monday.

City Attorney Dennis Herrera said landlords Darren and Valerie Lee have been running “an illicit hotel chain” during San Francisco’s housing crisis rather than lawfully renting the units to residential tenants.

Though it clearly appears the couple had violated San Francisco laws, the real question is the immoral nature of the laws.

[W]hat should really be on trial here are not the Herreras but the laws that San Francisco has put in place to stifle the gig economy. The Herrera family owns those apartment buildings and they pay the taxes, are responsible for all the maintenance and took the risk of investing in the properties. Clearly, there is a market for short-term rentals because if there weren’t they wouldn’t be able to remain profitable. Why is the city telling them how they must rent out their property?

The public doesn’t benefit from these laws, providing the owners keep the properties up to code and safe to inhabit. The only beneficiaries are the major hotel chains who charge outrageous prices for rooms and lobby politicians heavily (as well as donating generously to their campaigns) to try to squeeze out the gig economy. If the Herrera family has any hope of prevailing here it should come by way of a challenge to these short-term rental laws and the chance to expose the influence of the hotel lobby that drives them.

This is what you get when you allow government too much power: Corruption, favoritism, and oppression. I have in recent years made it my business to avoid California at all costs. This story reinforces that position.

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Puzzling fractures on Mars

11:31 am

Fractures on Mars

Cool image time! Today the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) science team released another month’s worth of images from the spacecraft’s high resolution camera. The picture on the right, reduced in resolution to post here, was the first image that I took a close look at, and decided it was worth posting immediately. If you click on the image you can see the full resolution version.

This image lacks a caption, but the release webpage is titled “Fractured Crater Floor.” It shows several cross-crossing fissures, some wide enough for dust to gather within into sand dunes. The fractures themselves appear to be cutting across a bulging dome.

My first reaction was to wonder where the heck this crater was on Mars, how big was it, and how dominate were the fractures within its floor. The image itself does not answer any of these questions. The fractures could be filling the floor, or not, and the crater could be small or big. Moreover, its location might help explain the cause of the fractures.

To understand any of the images from MRO it is always important to zoom out to get some context.
» Read more

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Democratic control of House threatens Space Force and SLS

8:57 am

Two articles today suggest that the switch to Democratic control of the House will threaten funding for both Trump’s Space Force as well as NASA’s SLS/Orion program.

I say, “Hallelujah!” Both are boondoggles of the worst kind, and illustrated how really uncommitted the Republicans in the House were to cutting spending. SLS/Orion has cost more than $40 billion so far, and will likely cost $60 billion before its first manned launch, and will take twenty years to fly a single manned mission. Space Force meanwhile is really nothing more than a consolidated space office in the Pentagon, and yet the Pentagon is proposing it will cost $13 billion for its first five years.

Both are pure pork, and if the Democrats want to garner real voter support they will stop with the “Resist Trump!” stupidity and shut both down, shifting support instead for private space.

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Russian company S7 says it will launch in three years

8:49 am

The Russian airline company S7 that now owns Sea Launch said today that it will launch a new rocket in three years.

The first rocket the company S7 Space is working on at the moment may take place in three years from now, the company’s chief, Sergey Sopov, told TASS in an interview, adding that the launch would be used for flight-testing a cargo spacecraft.

S7 Space is working on its own rocket on the basis of a sketch design of the Soyuz-5 launch vehicle being created by the space rocket corporation Energia.

“When we launch our new rocket for the first time, approximately in three years from now, we also plan to flight-test a cargo spacecraft. Roscosmos might order six space launches from us, thus keeping busy both its own enterprises and S7 Space,” Sopov said.

S7 originally was reworking the Sea Launch rocket so that it was built entirely in Russia, and had said it would resume flights by 2019 with twelve scheduled through 2022. Now it appears they have been hired by Roscosmos to build an entirely new launch vehicle and cargo freighter, in imitation of the U.S. approach to have private companies build its space rockets and craft.

Regardless, this is not encouraging. It indicates more delays, and it also suggests that S7 is not really in control of its future but has to take orders from Roscosmos.

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SpaceX to build test prototype of BFS, test on Falcon 9

8:36 am

Capitalism in space: SpaceX announced today that it is building a test prototype of its Big Falcon Spaceship, the upper stage of its Big Falcon Rocket, and it will use the Falcon 9 to do orbital flight tests.

Musk in a tweet said that they hope to to do the first flight by June 2019. Musk also said that they will not be testing vertical landing with this prototype, focusing instead on atmospheric re-entry. From this I can only assume it will not be recovered after its return to Earth.

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Leftist mob at home of Tucker Carlson: “You are not safe!”

11:09 pm

They’re coming for you next: A leftist mob tonight gathered in front of the private home of Fox anchor Tucker Carlson, making threats against him and his family.

They chanted, “We know where you sleep at night!” Then,

Tonight, we remind you that you are not safe either. …Racist scumbag, leave town,” the group chants.

It is revealing how the left repeatedly demands that everyone but them tone down the rhetoric.

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Soyuz from French Guiana successfully launches weather satellite

6:00 pm

A Russian Soyuz rocket tonight successfully launched a European weather satellite from French Guiana.

This success once again indicates that the manned Soyuz launch in December to ISS can take place as scheduled.

Though this was a Russian rocket, I count it as a Arianespace launch, as it is launched from their launchpad. Arianespace is also the operator and sales agent for the rocket. Obviously, this is open to interpretation.

The leaders in the 2018 launch race:

31 China
17 SpaceX
10 Russia
8 ULA
8 Europe (Arianespace)

China remains the leader in the national rankings, 31 to 26 over the U.S.

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Bennu’s two hemispheres

9:05 am

Bennu's two hemispheres

The image above of the two hemispheres of the asteroid Bennu, cropped and reduced very slightly to post here, was created from several images taken by OSIRIS-REx on two different days last week.

These two super-resolution views of asteroid Bennu were created using eight 2.5-millisecond exposure images captured by OSIRIS-REx on two separate days. The view on the left is composed of eight PolyCam images taken over the span of two minutes on Nov. 1, 2018, when the spacecraft was about 126 miles (203 km) from the asteroid. The one on the right – showing the opposite side of the asteroid – was generated using eight images taken during the same two-minute time slot on Nov. 2, from a distance of about 122 miles (196 km).

The rock on the southern limb is the same in both images, merely seen from opposite sides. Bennu appears very similar to Ryugu, except that there do appear to be dark areas on its surface, possibly crater sites, that might be smooth enough for landing.

The rendezvous at Bennu will occur on December 3.

UPDATE: The OSIRIS-REx science team has now released a short movie showing Bennu’s rotation as imaged during this same time period.

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SpaceX’s Tesla passes Mars’ orbit

8:54 am

Capitalism in space: The Tesla roadster that was put into solar orbit by the first Falcon Heavy launch in February has now successfully flown beyond Mars’ orbit.

The significance of this achievement is that this payload was put into solar orbit by a private company, using its own funds. The government had nothing to do with it.

For the entire history of the space age such a thing was considered absurd and impossible. You needed government to fund and build these big space projects. With this launch SpaceX and Elon Musk once again demonstrated how that accepted wisdom was bunk.

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NASA completes final parachute test for 2020 Mars rover mission

8:48 am

NASA has completed the third and final parachute test for its as yet unnamed 2020 Mars rover mission.

Three separate test launches (one Oct. 9, 2017, April 20, 2018, and Sept. 7, 2018) determined which parachute design would be used for the Mars 2020 mission. In 2012, a similar parachute concept was used for the Curiosity rover mission.

For this test, NASA said the parachute, which was made of nylon, Kevlar and Technora fibers, was packed into a “small drum-sized bag” before being launched to an altitude of about 23 miles (37 kilometers) and a speed of about Mach 1.8. Then, within less than a half-second, the 180-pound parachute was deployed and fully inflated with a volume of “a large house.”

Though doing engineering tests to prove your concept always makes sense, didn’t NASA do this for Curiosity, which then proved its parachute concept further by actually landing on Mars successfully? The 2020 rover is supposed to be saving money by using the Curiosity design. Why were these tests necessary?

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Luxembourg awards prize to Taiwan company

8:39 am

Capitalism in space: A Taiwanese company has won Luxembourg’s second SpaceResources.lu challenge, winning €500K.

Initiated by the ESA, the Space Exploration Masters competition targets participants from all around the world. A total of 7 prizes were awarded in collaboration with international partners, including a 500.000 euros prize by the Luxembourg Space Agency.

ODYSSEUS Space is a startup created in 2016 with the aim to provide innovative technologies and solutions for future deep space and swarm small satellite missions. To date, ODYSSEUS Space team members have participated in over 15 small satellite missions from 7 different countries.

As part of the deal, the company will move its headquarters from Taiwan to Luxembourg.

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China still struggling to find scientists to run FAST radio telescope

8:32 am

China is still finding it difficult to hire the scientists necessary to run its FAST radio telescope, the largest single dish radio telescope in the world.

And why is that?

For job candidates, the major stumbling blocks often are financial incentives and research independence, researchers told the South China Morning Post. The telescope’s remote location also may give candidates pause.

George Smoot, a Hong Kong University of Science and Technology professor who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006, said candidates interested in working in a more developed setting might think twice about spending a lot of time in an area known for its traditional rural villages.

“Another issue is how much the Chinese Academy of Sciences will influence and direct activities there,” Smoot said. “It is an issue to people unless they have some straight link.” [emphasis mine]

It must always be remembered that nothing in China is done without the government’s approval. For western astronomers, used to having a great deal of independence, this fact makes working there somewhat unappealing.

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Oumuamua might be artificial lightsail

3:45 pm

A new analysis of the velocity and path of the interstellar object Oumuamua suggests it might be an artificial lightsail.

The study, which was posted online earlier this month, suggests that Oumuamua’s strange “excess acceleration” could be artificial in nature, as it has been implied that it is not an active comet. “Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment,” researchers wrote in the paper.

The paper continues: “Lightsails with similar dimensions have been designed and constructed by our own civilization, including the IKAROS project and the Starshot Initiative. The lightsail technology might be abundantly used for transportation of cargos between planets or between stars.”

They even theorized that Oumuamua “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization,” though that scenario was called “exotic.”

All of this is speculation. However, that the object is moving faster than expected, based on the initial data of its path, is quite intriguing. The authors of the paper concluded that the excess speed was caused by “solar radiation pressure.” They also calculated that for the light pressure to cause that increase in speed as it moves away requires it to have a large surface area.

The observations are not sufficiently sensitive to provide a resolved image of ‘Oumuamua, and one can only speculate on its possible geometry and nature. Although periodic variations in the apparent magnitude are observed, there are still too many degrees of freedom (e.g., observing angle, non-uniform reflectively, etc.) to definitely constrain the geometry. The geometry should not necessarily be that of a planar sheet, but may acquire other shapes, e.g., involving a curved sheet, a hollow cone or ellipsoidal, etc. Depending on the geometry our estimated value for the mass-to-area ratio will change, but the correction is typically of order unity.

They then speculate the possibility of the object being an interstellar probe.

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Sunspot update October 2018: Deepening minimum

9:04 am

The monthly NOAA update of the solar cycle, covering sunspot activity for October 2018, was released yesterday. As I have done every month since this website began in July 2011, I am posting it below, annotated to give it some context.

Though there was a tiny uptick in sunspot activity on the Sun in October, the uptick was inconsequential. Overall, the activity in the past few months appears to closely match the weak activity seen in late 2007 and early 2008, just when the last solar minimum began.

October 2018 sunspot activity

The graph above has been modified to show the predictions of the solar science community. The green curves show the community’s two original predictions from April 2007, with half the scientists predicting a very strong maximum and half predicting a weak one. The red curve is their revised May 2009 prediction.

As I noted in August, the NOAA graph is now getting very close to its right edge, which ends in December 2018. They will very soon have to update this graph so that it can take us into the next solar cycle. While they must do this, it will unfortunately end the standard visual used by them for more than a decade for showing the progress of the solar cycle. Depending on how they change it, I might be able adapt it to include this graph to allow a continuation of the same visual into the future. We will have to see.

Having seen now the full solar maximum for this cycle (weak and short), we are now moving to the next question: Will the developing solar minimum be as long and as deep as the last? Will it evolve into a grand minimum, lasting decades, as some solar scientists believe?

Or will the Sun return to the higher levels of activity seen during most of the 24 solar cycles observed since the last grand minimum in the 1600s?

Since our understanding of these changes is very poor, your guess is likely as good as anyone else’s. All we can really do is keep our eyes open and watch what happens.

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Farrakhan leads “Death to America” chants in Iran

8:25 am

They’re coming for you next: Louis Farrakhan, friend and ally to the Democratic Party and its leadership, this week visited Iran where he led of chants “Death to America” and “Death to Israel.”

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan led a chant of “Death to America!” on a solidarity visit to Iran this weekend, according to Iranian news sources. He also led a chant of “Death to Israel!”

Farrakhan visited Iran ahead of the renewal of U.S. sanctions against the regime at midnight on November 5. The renewed sanctions are the result of the American withdrawal from the agreement negotiated by the Obama administration, which purported to prevent Iran’s development of nuclear weapons but merely delayed it.

Any vote for any Democrat on election day will essentially be an endorsement of this behavior, as the Democratic Party at all levels for many years has shown strong ties and sympathy for Farrakhan and his brand of bigotry and anti-American hate.

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Airbus to deliver the first Orion service module to NASA this week

8:44 pm

My heart be still! Airbus will deliver this week the first Orion service module to NASA.

Airbus will deliver the first European Service Module (ESM) for NASA’s Orion spacecraft from its aerospace site in Bremen, Germany on 5 November 2018. An Antonov cargo aircraft will fly the ESM to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, USA. This is the result of four years of development and construction, and represents the achievement of a key milestone in the project. ESA selected Airbus as the prime contractor for the development and manufacturing of the first ESM in November 2014.

Four years to simply build a single manned capsule’s service module. At this pace we might be able to colonize Mars and the Moon in about 200 years, maybe!

Note however that NASA only has funding to build 1.5 of these European service modules. It is possible that Congress has allocated additional funds, but if so, I missed it.

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Russia launches another Soyuz, placing GPS-type satellite in orbit

8:39 pm

Russia today successfully placed a Glonass GPS-type satellite in orbit using a variation of its Soyuz rocket.

This is the second launch of a Soyuz since the October 11 manned launch failure. Though both launches used versions different from the October 11 rocket, the first stage strap-on boosters as well as second core stage were the same, providing strong proof that the December manned launch to ISS can go on as planned.

The leaders in the 2018 launch race:

31 China
17 SpaceX
10 Russia
8 ULA
7 Europe (Arianespace)

China still leads the U.S. 31 to 26 in the national rankings.

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Musk endorses Trump’s Space Force proposal

9:28 am

In a long hour long interview (which you can listen to at the link), Elon Musk endorsed President Trump’s proposal to create a Space Force.

Elon Musk sees a new branch of the U.S. Armed Forces as “obvious” as Americans travel far off the planet. “It’s basically defense in space. And then I think also it could be pretty helpful for maybe expanding our civilization,” Musk told Kara Swisher on a new episode of Recode Decode. “I do think it will become obvious over time that a Space Force is a sensible thing to do.”

Donald Trump pitched the new military operation this year, and hopes to have it running by 2020, bringing the military into conversation with space leaders like NASA and Musk’s SpaceX. It would sit alongside branches like the Army and the Air Force.

Musk described the agency as similar to the Air Force, something he said was criticized as unnecessary when air wars were managed by the Army but which is now a specialized division. “And people today may not realize back then it was wildly penned as a ridiculous thing to create the Air Force, but now everyone’s like, ‘Obviously you should have an Air Force,’” Musk said. “And I think it’s gonna become obvious that we should have a Space Force, too.”

I don’t have time now to listen to the hour-plus-long interview, but it appears Musk talked about other things of interest, making worth one’s time.

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Danish astronomers question gravitational wave detection

9:23 am

The uncertainty of science: A team of Danish astronomers have questioned the gravitational wave detection achieved in the past few years by the LIGO gravitational wave telescopes.

The details are complex and very much in dispute, and the position of these Danish astronomers is very much in the minority, but their doubts have not been dismissed, and illustrate well the best aspects science. The article also outlines how the physics community and the LIGO scientists have welcomed the skepticism, even as they have doubts about the claims of the Danish astronomers. This is the hallmark of good science, and lends weight to the work at LIGO.

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Head of Webb investigation: Webb was “a step too far”

9:11 am

The head of an investigation panel into the James Webb Space Telescope admitted this week that, though he and the panel fully support the telescope’s completion and launch, he also believes the telescope was too ambitious and “a step too far.”

Speaking at a meeting of the Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics of the National Academies’ Space Studies Board Oct. 29, Tom Young said that while the mission may ultimately be a success, its difficulties provide lessons as NASA considers future large astronomy missions in the next decadal survey.

“I, personally, have come to the conclusion that JWST had too many inventions, too much risk, and was a step too far,” he said at the end of a presentation about the review board’s work.

Young emphasized that he was neither opposed to JWST being completed nor had doubts it could be done successfully. “There are a group people who are diehard supporters of JWST, and there are others who support it, but they’re really angry at the cost growth and the schedule delays,” he said.

You think? Webb was supposed to cost about $500 million, and launch in 2007. Its budget is now almost $10 billion, and it will not launch before 2021. In the process it has destroyed the entire astronomy program at NASA, preventing the construction of any other space telescopes.

The key question is whether the astronomy community or NASA has learned anything from this disaster. I personally am doubtful, since they are still pushing for WFIRST, a similar big boondoggle that will cost billions and is already overbudget and behind schedule, though it is only in its design stage.

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