Category: Points of Information

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

China launches its X-37B copy on its third mission

3:52 pm

China today used its Long March 2F rocket to place its copy of the Boeing X-37B resusable mini-shuttle, lifting off from the Jiuquin spaceport in the northwest of China.

China released no real information about the mission nor did it release any images of the launch. This mission comes only seven months after the last touched down, the fastest turnaround yet, suggesting China is working out the kinks for reuse. It is also possible this is simply a second spacecraft, since they tell us nothing of substance.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

91 SpaceX
59 China
16 Russia
7 Rocket Lab (with a launch scheduled for tonight)
7 India

American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 103 to 59, and the entire world combined 103 to 93. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) 91 to 93.

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Perseverance looks at Jezero Crater in high resolution

11:52 am

Perseverance's future route
Click for full image.

The Perseverance science team earlier this week released a mosaic taken by the rover’s high resolution over three days in November, showing the entire 360 degree view of Jezero Crater from where Perservance sat during the month long solar conjunction that month, when communications with Mars was cut off due to the Sun being in the way.

Part of that panorama, significantly reduced, cropped, and enhanced, is posted above, focusing on the western rim of Jezero Crater and the route that Perseverance will likely take in the future. Below is an overview map that indicates by the yellow lines the approximate area covered by this picture. The light blue dot marks Perseverance’s present location, while the dark blue dot marks where it took the mosaic and was also stationed during that solar conjunction. The dotted red line on both images marks the approximate proposed route that the science team is considering for leaving Jezero crater. Instead of going out through Neretva Vallis, they are instead considering heading south to go over the crater’s rim itself.

Ingenuity’s present position is marked by the green dot. This is where it landed after flight 67 on December 2nd. On December 8th the helicopter’s engineering team had released the flight plan for flight 68, scheduling it for December 9th, but as of this date it appears that flight has not occurred. I suspect the delay is because communication between Ingenuity and Perseverance is presently spotty, though the Ingenuity team has released no information.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

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The scientific results from South Korea’s first lunar orbiter Danuri

9:56 am

floor of Shackleton Crater
The floor of Shackleton Crater at the Moon’s
south pole. Click for original image.

Link here. The article provides a good summary, with three results of significance:

  • NASA’s Shadowcam camera successfully obtained low light images of the permanently shadowed craters at the Moon’s south pole. One of those images is to the right. All images showed no obvious evidence of ice. The arrow points to the track of a boulder that rolled down the slope.
  • A gamma-ray detector, designed to map the chemcial surface of the Moon, ended up detecting many intergalactic gamma-ray bursts, including the brightest ever in October 2022 that was observed by numerous detectors.
  • Data of the Moon’s magnetic field suggested the far side was “more electrically conductive than the near side,” a result that scientists said “doesn’t make sense.”

Danuri is still functioning, long after its primary mission was completed, and could continue to operate for years yet.

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Musk fires back at FCC decision to cancel its $886 million Starlink grant award

9:45 am

In a tweet late on December 12, 2024, Elon Musk fired back at the FCC for its decision to cancel its $886 million Starlink grant award first awarded to SpaceX in 2020 under the FCC program to encourage companies to provide broadband internet services to rural areas. As Musk noted quite accurately:

Doesn’t make sense. Starlink is the only company actually solving rural broadband at scale!

They should arguably dissolve the program and return funds to taxpayers, but definitely not send it those who aren’t getting the job done.

What actually happened is that the companies that lobbied for this massive earmark (not us) thought they would win, but instead were outperformed by Starlink, so now they’re changing the rules to prevent SpaceX from competing.

In September Musk had also endorced a Wall Street Journal editoral that suggested the Biden administration was attempting to cancel this grant because “it has it in for Elon Musk.” Musk response: “Sure seems that way.”

It seems that way even more so now. I wonder if Musk will now sue. Above all however he is right when he argues the entire program should be dissolved and the money returned to the taxpayer. There is no justification for the FCC to hand out this cash, especially when multiple private companies, not just SpaceX, are getting the job done and making profits at the same time.

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The scrub of this week’s Falcon Heavy launch of X-37B

9:31 am

In what has become quite rare, SpaceX was forced to scrub its December 11, 2023 launch of its Falcon Heavy rocket, carrying one of the Space Force’s X-37B spacecraft, due to technical problems.

Initially, the cause of the scrub was linked to a problem with the company’s ground systems, not the rocket itself. This in itself is significant, because of the almost hundred launches SpaceX has done this year, almost none have been scrubbed, and the few that have been scrubbed were almost always because of weather conditions. The company has gotten its launch ground systems and rockets working like clockwork, so to have a problem with the ground systems on this Falcon Heavy launch was quite unusual.

SpaceX officials initially thought they would be able to fix the problem and launch after only one or two days delay. However, shortly thereafter unstated additional problems were identified that required the company to roll the rocket back to its assembly building for more work.

As a result, the launch date is now to be determined, and could even be delayed to early next year. The article at the link focuses on how this rescheduling could impact two other launches that carry commercial lunar landers. This I think is unlikely, since both work under much more restrictive launch windows, for this reason are almost certain to get priority in scheduling.

More important is the question as to what caused the initial scrub and then the need to roll the rocket back for more checkouts. Are the problems with the Falcon Heavy or with the X-37B spacecraft, or with some issue involving both? Neither SpaceX nor the Space Force would release any details. The fact that SpaceX now so rarely has technical issues at launch suggests some problem with the X-37B, but that conclusion is pure speculation.

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Amazon files to have shareholder lawsuit dismissed

9:15 am

On December 11, 2023 Amazon requested dismissal of a shareholder lawsuit against it for acting in bad faith by excluding SpaceX in its initial launch contracts with ULA, Arianespace, and Blue Origin to put its Kuiper constellation of satellites into orbit.

The lawsuit claimed that the board performed little diligence on the proposed contracts to launch the 3,236-satellite constellation with the Ariane 6, New Glenn and Vulcan Centaur rockets. The combined contracts were, it stated, the second largest capital expenditure in Amazon’s history at the time, trailing only its $13.7 billion acquisition of grocer Whole Foods.

The lawsuit stated that the board and its audit committee spent “barely an hour” reviewing those contracts, including those that would go to Blue Origin and ULA. Blue Origin is owned by Amazon founder and former chief executive Jeff Bezos, while ULA has a contract with Blue Origin to use BE-4 engines on its Vulcan rocket. The suit estimated that nearly 45% of the value of the contracts goes to Blue Origin either directly or through the BE-4 engine contract with ULA.

Amazon’s call for dismissal disputes these claims, stating that the board spent far more time on the issue, and then documents this. Interestingly, it makes no mention of the recent additional launch contract Amazon signed with SpaceX on December 3, 2023, but it is obvious that this filing was timed to occur afterward in order to strengthen Amazon’s case.

Amazon’s response (available at the link above) is heavily redacted, so some of the company’s claims are difficult to assess. For example, if the board did consider the issue of launch contractors properly, the subject of using SpaceX should have come up and been discussed at length. The redactions make it impossible to determine if this was so. If anything, what can be read suggests SpaceX was dismissed as an option far too quickly.

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NASA celebrates the 120th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight

8:58 am

Link here. The NASA article does a thorough job of not only describing that first powered flight from Kitty Hawk, it shows how that success is linked to the establishment first of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), which after Sputnik became NASA.

NASA in turn has repeatedly honored the Wright Brothers and their work on subsequent space missions.

Pieces of the Wright Flyer, sometimes called Kitty Hawk, have flown in space, carried there by astronauts with a geographic connection and a sense of history. In 1969, under a special arrangement with the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, Apollo 11 astronaut Neil A. Armstrong, like the Wright brothers a native of Ohio, took with him a piece of wood from the Wright Flyer’s left propeller and a piece of muslin fabric (8 by 13 inches) from its upper left wing. The items, stowed in his Lunar Module Eagle personal preference kit, landed with him and fellow astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin at Tranquility Base, and returned to Earth with third crew member Michael Collins in the Command Module Columbia. Visitors can view these items near the Wright Flyer at the NASM.

In 1986, North Carolina native NASA astronaut Michael J. Smith arranged with the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh to take a piece of wood and a swatch of fabric salvaged, and authenticated by Orville Wright, from the damaged Wright Flyer aboard space shuttle Challenger’s STS-51L mission. Although Challenger and its crew perished in the tragic accident, divers recovered the artifacts from the wreckage and visitors can view them at the North Carolina Museum of History.

…A piece of the Wright Flyer has even traveled beyond the Earth-Moon system. When the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover landed in Mars’ Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021, it carried underneath it a four-pound autonomous helicopter named Ingenuity. Engineers attached a small piece of cloth the size of a postage stamp from the Wright Flyer’s wing to a cable underneath the helicopter’s solar panel. On April 19, 2021, when Ingenuity lifted off to a height of 10 feet, it marked the first powered aircraft flight on a world other than Earth. Ingenuity’s first flight lasted 39 seconds in an area NASA named Wright Brothers Field. The United Nations International Civil Aviation Organization gave the field the airport code of JZRO – for Jezero Crater – and the helicopter type designator IGY, with the call-sign INGENUITY.

There is one major difference between NASA and the Wright Brothers. The latter worked independently with private funds given voluntarily. The former has always been a governent operation, funded by coerced taxes. The consequences of this difference are so profound many have written books describing them.

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December 13, 2023 Quick space links – All Russia today

3:32 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

  • Russia planning to lay off several major managers in manned program

    • The article at the link states that this decision suggests Roscosmos is shifting from space exploration and science to doing military and commercial missions. Sadly, these former communists still don’t understand how freedom works, which if allowed to flourish will end up paying for both.

 

  • Russia’s proposed space station is shrinking

    • This story is related to the first above. Rather than having the new station made up of several modules, like ISS, Tiangong-3, and Mir, Roscosmos’ division that builds its manned spacecraft, Energia, is working out a one-module design comparable to the Soviet Union’s Salyut stations from the 1970s.

In other words, the news from Russia today is that it is recognizing it no longer has the capability to build a manned space program. The decision to invade the Ukraine, and the resulting isolation and loss of its international satellite business, has left Roscosmos very short of cash.

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The end of a 400-mile-long Martian escarpment

2:50 pm

The end of a 400-mile-long escarpment
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and enhanced to post here, was taken on August 14, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. It shows the cracked top of a enscarpment, with the bottom point to the west about 2,400 feet lower in elevation.

The north-south cracks at the top of the cliff indicate faults. They also suggest that the cliff itself its slowly separating from eastern plateau. North from this point, beyond the edge of this picture, are several places where such a separation has already occurred, with the collapsed cliff leaving a wide pile of landslide debris at the base.

This cliff actually continues north for another 400 miles, suggesting that the ground shifted along this entire distance, with the ground to the east going up and ground to the west going down. Because the cliff is such a distinct and large feature, it has its own name, Claritas Rupes, “rupes” being the Latin word for cliff.
» Read more

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FCC denies Starlink $886 million grant

9:48 am

Despite the fact that SpaceX Starlink constellation is presently providing internet access to more rural customers than any company worldwide, the FCC yesterday announced that it will not award the company a $886 million subsidy under its program for expanding broadband service to rural areas.

The FCC announced today that it won’t award Elon Musk’s Starlink an $886 million subsidy from the Universal Service Fund for expanding broadband service in rural areas. The money would have come from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund program (RDOF), but the FCC writes that Starlink wasn’t able to “demonstrate that it could deliver the promised service” and that giving the subsidy to it wouldn’t be “the best use of limited Universal Service Fund dollars.”

That was the same reason the FCC gave when it rejected Starlink’s bid last year, which led to this appeal. SpaceX had previously won the bidding to roll out 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload “low-latency internet to 642,925 locations in 35 states,” funded by the RDOF.

This decision can only be explained by utterly political reasons. SpaceX right now is experiencing a booming business, with its traffic up two and a half times from last year,almost all of which is in rural areas. That number is from a news report today, the same day the FCC claims Starlink can’t provide such service. As noted by one SpaceX lawyer:

“Starlink is arguably the only viable option to immediately connect many of the Americans who live and work in the rural and remote areas of the country where high-speed, low-latency internet has been unreliable, unaffordable, or completely unavailable, the very people RDOF was supposed to connect.”

The initial award was made in December 2020, when Trump was still president. It was first canceled in August 2022, after Biden took over. SpaceX appealed, but today’s announcement says the FCC rejected that appeal.

While there is absolutely no justification to give any company this money — SpaceX is proving private companies don’t need it to provide this service to rural areas — this decision is clearly political, driven by the hate of Elon Musk among Democrats and the Biden administration. They don’t care that SpaceX is a successeful private company providing tens of thousands of jobs as well as good products to Americans. Musk does not support them, and so he must be squashed.

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In 2023 scientists set a new record for the most papers retracted

9:33 am

According to a report in the science journal Nature published today, in 2023 scientists set a new record for the most papers retracted in a single year and illustrating the steady rise of fake papers in recent years.

The number of retractions issued for research articles in 2023 has passed 10,000 — smashing annual records — as publishers struggle to clean up a slew of sham papers and peer-review fraud. Among large research-producing nations, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China have the highest retraction rates over the past two decades, a Nature analysis has found.

The bulk of 2023’s retractions were from journals owned by Hindawi, a London-based subsidiary of the publisher Wiley. So far this year, Hindawi journals have pulled more than 8,000 articles, citing factors such as “concerns that the peer review process has been compromised” and “systematic manipulation of the publication and peer-review process”, after investigations prompted by internal editors and by research-integrity sleuths who raised questions about incoherent text and irrelevant references in thousands of papers.

Wiley is moving to shut down this Hindawi subsidiary, canceling many of the journals and abandoning the name entirely. Meanwhile, the overall problem continues to grow, and threatens to get worse with the introduction of papers that can be written entirely by the new artificial intelligence software.

Much of this problem is tied to our bankrupt academic system, which judges scientists by the number of papers the publish rather than how they teach in the classroom. Thus, research scientists at universities have no motive to teach well. Instead they focus on getting papers in print, even if they have to fake it.

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