Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Early today Arianespace successfully launched three French military reconnaissance satellites using its mostly Italian-made Vega rocket.
This was the third successful Vega launch since a 2020 launch failure.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
41 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
5 Europe (Arianespace)
China remains ahead of the U.S. 41 to 38 in the national rankings.
An evening pause: The mix of cultures here is somewhat amusing. The music and performance however are grand.
Hat tip Able Windsor.
The FAA today announced that it hopes to complete the permit process for SpaceX’s Starship operations at Boca Chica by the end of this year.
If you go to the link you will see a table that shows the agency’s overall plan. The table also suggests that extensions in the permitting process are also possible, though it appears the FAA is working now to avoid this.
I say excellent. I also say I will believe it when I see it. I want the FAA to show me my skepticism of this bureaucratic process is not justified. I want it to prove to me that there is no politics working in the background to slow the process.
Remember, after six months of work the FAA’s draft reassessment approved SpaceX’s Starship operations. To now delay or reject that approval will require a some heavy outside pressure, since the majority of the comments received by the the FAA during the comment period were favorable to the project.
In what appears to be a test of Russia’s anti-satellite system dubbed Nudol, a defunct Russia satellite has been blasted into approximately 1,500 pieces by a missile launched from Russia.
Under normal circumstances, Kosmos 1408 would not have approached the International Space Station closely enough to pose a threat, however following the breakup, thousands of individual pieces of debris will have scattered into their own orbits. At least 1,500 pieces of debris from the satellite have already been identified by the United States Space Command. However, many smaller objects will have been generated, which will take much longer to identify. With high relative velocities, even a tiny fragment can cause significant damage should it collide with another spacecraft.
Owing to concerns about the debris cloud, the crew aboard the ISS were instructed to close hatches between the space station’s modules and take shelter aboard the Dragon and Soyuz capsules docked to the station.
According to the story at the link, ISS will cut through the expected debris cloud every orbit.
It is amazing that Russia would perform such a test on a satellite with an orbit that close to ISS’s, especially since there are many pieces of abandoned space junk in lower orbits so that their debris clouds would pose little problem, especially because their orbits would decay quickly.
This test is comparable to the Chinese anti-sat test in 2007, which caused a larger debris cloud that still poses a threat to ISS and other working satellites.
According to the Outer Space Treaty, a nation must control the objects it puts in space so that they pose no risk to others. Both the Russian and Chinese anti-sat tests prove these nations have no respect for the treaties they sign.
Whites go to the back of the bus at MacArthur Medical Center
At the MacArthur Medical Center in Irving, Texas a white man was denied COVID monoclonal antibody treatments for the single reason that he happened to be white.
We know this is true because the individual, Harrison Hill Smith, posted a video of his experience, available at the link. Here is a transcript:
“So I’m not going to be able to get it today because I don’t qualify? What if I smoke or vape? What if I were black and Hispanic. Then I’d be able to qualify?” the white man, presumably Harrison Hill Smith, asks the healthcare worker in the video.
“Yup,” the healthcare worker, who’s black, replies.
“I’m being denied medical service because of my race?” Smith then asks again just to confirm.
“That’s the criteria,” the worker indifferently responds.
It also appears that the Texas Department of Health approves this discriminatory policy.
» Read more
According to a new NASA inspector general report released today [pdf], because of numerous technical, budgetary, and management issues, the planned Artemis manned lunar landing now set for 2025 is likely to be delayed several years beyond that date. From the report’s summary:
NASA’s three initial Artemis missions, designed to culminate in a crewed lunar landing, face varying degrees of technical difficulties and delays heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic and weather events that will push launch schedules from months to years past the Agency’s current goals. With Artemis I mission elements now being integrated and tested at Kennedy Space Center, we estimate NASA will be ready to launch by summer 2022 rather than November 2021 as planned. Although Artemis II is scheduled to launch in late 2023, we project that it will be delayed until at least mid-2024 due to the mission’s reuse of Orion components from Artemis I. … Given the time needed to develop and fully test [SpaceX’s Starship lunar lander] and new spacesuits, we project NASA will exceed its current timetable for landing humans on the Moon in late 2024 by several years. [emphasis mine]
Gosh, it sure didn’t long for my prediction from last week — that the new target date of ’25 was garbage — to come true.
Today’s report also states that it does not expect the first test launch of SLS to occur in February ’22, as NASA presently predicts, but later, in the summer of ’22. It then notes that the next SLS launch, meant to be the first manned launch of SLS and Orion and presently scheduled for late ’23, will almost certainly be delayed to mid-’24. And that’s assuming all goes well on the first unmanned test flight.
While the report lauds SpaceX’s fast development pace, it also does not have strong confidence in SpaceX’s ability to get its Starship lunar lander ready on time, and believes that NASA could see its completion occurring from three to four years later than planned.
The report also confirms an August 2021 inspector general report about NASA’s failed program to develop lunar spacesuits, stating that its delays make a ’24 lunar landing impossible.
The report states that Gateway is well behind schedule, and will likely not be operational until ’26, at the earliest. While the present plan for that first manned lunar landing does not require Gateway, Gateway’s delays and cost overruns impact the overall program.
Finally, the report firmly states that the per launch cost of SLS is $4.1 billion, a price that will make any robust lunar exploration program utterly unsustainable.
Before the arrival of Trump, NASA’s original plan for SLS and Gateway called for a manned lunar landing in 2028. The Trump administration attempted to push NASA to get it done by ’24. This inspector general report suggests to me that this push effort was largely wasted, that NASA’s Artemis program will likely continue to have repeated delays, announced piecemeal in small chunks. This has been the public relations strategy of NASA throughout its entire SLS program. They announce a target date and then slowly over time delay it in small amounts to hide the fact that the real delay is many years.
Expect this same pattern with the manned lunar landing mission. They announce a delay of one year from ’24 to ’25. After a year they will then announce another delay to ’26. A year later another delay to ’27. And so forth.
Click for original map.
This past week the Chinese press released a new but limited update on the status of both its Mars orbiter Tianwen-1 and its Mars rover Zhurong.
The map to the right uses as its background a high resolution picture from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. I have superimposed Zhurong’s route in green. You can get an idea of how far the rover has traveled since resuming communications with Earth in late October by comparing this map with the one I posted then. After stopping at a small sand dune (the crescent-shaped white features), it curved around to head to the southeast towards a rough area and a trough that is thought to be filled with sediment.
Meanwhile, the orbiter has shifted its orbit, changing from one dedicated mainly as providing a communications relay between Zhurong and Earth to one that now allows it to begin a two-year photographic survey of Mars.
To supplement the resulting gaps in communications for Zhurong, China and the European Space Agency (ESA) have made their first test using ESA’s Mars Express satellite as a relay satellite. Both hope to know soon whether it worked.
In either case, Zhurong’s travels will likely be slowed somewhat due to the reduction in communications access.
The new colonial movement: According to its social media channel, a Chinese pseudo-company is building a new floating sea platform to be used for both rocket launches of all kinds as well as first stage landings.
The 533 feet (162.5 meters) long, 131 feet (40 meters) wide “New-type rocket launching vessel” is being constructed for use with the new China Oriental Spaceport at Haiyang, Shandong province on the Eastern coast.
The new ship is expected to enter service in 2022. It will feature integrated launch support equipment and be capable of facilitating launches of the Long March 11, larger commercial “Smart Dragon” rockets and, in the future, liquid propellant rockets, according to the social media channel for the spaceport.
The vessel could also in the future be used for the recovery of first stages, possibly in the same way as SpaceX’s autonomous spaceport drone ships provide a landing platform for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rocket first stages.
Long March 11 uses solid rocket motors and is designed for quick launch from a simple launchpad, so this platform would work easily with it. Changing that platform to handle liquid fueled rockets however is not trivial, and once done the platform would not necessarily be a good place to land first stages, considering the presence very nearby of fuel tanks and fuel lines.
A Russian astronaut today told mission control that he thinks he has located another leak in the Zvezda module of ISS.
Roscosmos cosmonaut Pyotr Dubrov detected a possible air leak spot in the intermediate chamber of the Zvezda module aboard the International Space Station (ISS), the cosmonaut told the Flight Control Center during a communications session on Monday.
The Russian cosmonaut said he had traced the possible spot of the continued air leak while inspecting the Zvezda module’s intermediate chamber at the weekend. “I began preparing a perimeter for laying a cord today. I detected a suspicious spot and started to examine it,” the cosmonaut said, replying to a question about the work in the intermediate compartment in a live broadcast by NASA.
As the Russian cosmonaut said, he made a photo of the detected spot using a microscope with magnifying lens. He did not make video footage of the works, he said. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted words are significant. Up until now all leaks that the Russians have identified have been in Zvezda’s aft section, the part where the docking port is located. That pattern suggested that the many dockings over the module’s two decade-plus lifespan could have led to stress fractures in that module.
That they might have now found an air leak in intermediate section of the module suggests that the age-caused stress fractures are occurring in a more widespread manner. This is very concerning.
On a positive note, when the astronauts sealed the earlier leaks in the aft module, the loss of air dropped significantly. If the leak stops entirely when they seal this leak, we will have some confidence that the problem is under some control, for the time being.
SpaceX used its Falcon 9 rocket to launch another 53 Starlink satellites this morning.
The company also successfully landed its first stage.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
41 China
25 SpaceX
18 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
4 ULA
4 Europe (Arianespace)
China now leads the U.S. 41 to 38 in the national rankings. For SpaceX, this launch tied its own record for the most launches in a single year by a private company.
Off caving now. I hope everyone enjoys their Saturday.
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, well worth your time, go here.
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Glen de Vries, one of the passengers that flew last month on Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft with William Shatner, has died in a plane crash yesterday in New Jersey.
The New Jersey State Police named the two victims of the single-engine plane crash who died in Hampton Township’s Kemah Lake section of Sussex County on Thursday afternoon.
Thomas P. Fischer, 54, of Hopatcong and Glen M. de Vries, 49 of New York, New York, died in the crash, Trooper Brandi Slota, a spokesperson from the State Police, said early Friday.
Apparently Fischer was a flight instructor at Essex County Airport, where de Vries learned to fly.
Capitalism in space: SpaceX today successfully completed a short static fire test of Starship prototype #20 using all six orbital engines.
Though this prototype has previously completed static fire tests, those used only two engines. This test was the first using all the engines that will fly on the spacecraft’s first orbital flight.
When that flight will occur remains uncertain. Elon Musk has said it could fly as early as this month. First however the FAA must give final approval of its environmental reassessment of SpaceX’s Boca Chica spaceport. The agency has released a preliminary draft approval, but that is not yet finalized, with no clear date on when an approval will be issued.
Click for full image.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The first photo to the right, rotated, cropped, and reduced to post here, was taken on September 19, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows what appears to be snow nestled in the hollows of many dunes.
The second photo, cropped to post here, shows in high resolution the area in the white box.
Is that snow water, or dry ice? The location is very far north, 76 degrees latitude, so it could be either. Since the photo was requested by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, I emailed her to ask. Her answer:
Early in the spring all the bright stuff is dry ice. As it gets later in the spring it is probably still mostly dry ice but with HiRISE images alone we cannot really distinguish the composition of the ice. In-between the dunes it is almost certainly bare ground late in the spring, but since the dunes are dark the surface just looks bright in contrast
This picture was taken in summer, which suggests the snow is probably water, not dry ice. Yet, all the snow is found in the north-facing hollows, places that will remain mostly in shadow at this high latitude, 76 degrees north. Thus, it is possible that the snow is the last remaining traces of the thin dry ice mantle that covers the Martian poles down to about 60 degrees latitude during the winter, and sublimates away in summer.
Hansen had requested a whole bunch of similar images of such snowy dunes. As she explained,
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That’s apparently what the Scottsdale school board thinks.
They’re coming for you next: Parents who have publicly objected to the mask mandate policies of a Scottsdale, Arizona school board have discovered that at least two members of the school board, Jann-Michael Greenburg and Zachary Lindsay, had compiled or had access to a Google drive folder containing personal information of the parents, including social security numbers, financial information, pictures of themselves and their children.
The information as complied clearly suggested the board members were going to use it to harass and harm the parents.
Parents have since dubbed the Google Drive an “online dossier.” The folders housed within the dossier are labeled “SUSD Wackos,” “Press Conference Psychos,” and “Anti Mask Lunatics,” among others. Included under “Press Conference Psychos” was a video that shows parents calmly holding signs that read “CRT is Racist” and “SUSD We Demand Transparency.”
The dossier takes specific aim at the concerned parent group “Community Advocacy Network” (CAN). Administrators and founders of CAN’s active Facebook page have folders dedicated to screenshots of their Facebook comments, pictures of them with their husbands, and in some cases financial records.
Much of the information was apparently gathered by Greenburg’s father, who is documented to have videotaped the parents repeatedly, sometimes hiding his identity. He also has a track record of harassment.
» Read more
The new colonial movement: Following a meeting with high space officials, a South Korean lawmaker announced yesterday that his country is now planning the design and construction of a reusable rocket.
“Starting next year, the development of a high-performance reusable rocket with liquid-fueled 100-ton thrust engines will begin,” said Rep. Cho Seung-rae of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea, who represents the committee. “Having such a liquid-fueled high-performance rocket engine is necessary [for South Korea] to successfully fulfill the missions of launching a [robotic] lunar lander by 2030 and building the Korea Positioning System by 2035 on its own.”
Cho said the envisioned engine will be “capable of controlling its thrust with four consecutive reburns,” a function which he said would “significantly slash launch cost.” The lawmaker said the government will carry out two-year preliminary research on the issue, with the budget of 12 billion won ($10.2 million) in hand.
South Korea has yet to successfully launch its own homebuilt Nuri rocket, with the first test flight failing less than a month ago.
In addition, this announcement was a surprise, as the budget request for ’22, made in September, had not included it. It appears that this lawmaker and those high space officials teamed up to propose it. We shall see if it gets into the final budget.
Episode four of the six part series, The Age of Discovery 2.0, from the podcast, History Unplugged, is now available here.
This is the episode where Scott Rank interviewed me about my new book, Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. From his show summary:
Today’s guest is Robert Zimmerman, author of “Conscious Choice,” which describes the history of the first century of British settlement in North America. That was when those settlers were building their own new colonies and had to decide whether to include slaves from Africa.
In New England, slavery was vigorously rejected. The Puritans wanted nothing to do with this institution, desiring instead to form a society of free religious families, a society that became the foundation of the United States of American, dedicated to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
In Virginia however, slavery was gladly embraced, resulting in a corrupt social order built on power, rule, and oppression.
Why the New England citizens were able to reject slavery, and Virginians were not, is the story with direct implications for all human societies, whether they are here on Earth or on the far-flung planets across the universe.
I think what I say nicely complements what Glenn Reynolds and Robert Zubrin said in the previous episodes.
Data obtained by scientists using ground-based telescopes now suggests that the small asteroid Kamo`oalewa, which has an orbit that makes it a quasi-Moon of the Earth, might have originally come from the Moon.
From their paper’s abstract:
We find that (469219) Kamoʻoalewa rotates with a period of 28.3 (+1.8/−1.3) minutes and displays a reddened reflectance spectrum from 0.4–2.2 microns. This spectrum is indicative of a silicate-based composition, but with reddening beyond what is typically seen amongst asteroids in the inner solar system. We compare the spectrum to those of several material analogs and conclude that the best match is with lunar-like silicates. This interpretation implies extensive space weathering and raises the prospect that Kamo’oalewa could comprise lunar material.
Kam’oalewa — which is only about 150 feet across — is one of five such quasi-Earth-moons. All orbit the Sun in orbits that are similar to the Earth’s and are such that the asteroids periodically loop around our planet each year.
This data will be useful to the Chinese, who are planning a mission to Kamo-oalewa in ’24 to grab samples.
Mao’s 1966 cultural revolution comes to the
University of Illinois-Chicago
Persecution is now cool! Law professor Jason Kilborn at the University of Illinois-Chicago was suspended by his university and forced to undergo a mental examination plus drug tests essentially because some unnamed students objected to an exam question that referenced racial slurs and that Kilborn had been using in his tests for a decade.
Kilborn told Campus Reform that his classes “were cancelled for the entire semester on the very first day of class. He said he also had to undergo “an agonizing several-week period of ‘administrative leave,’” during which he was “barred from campus and prevented from participating in normal faculty communications and activities, including my elected position on the university promotion and tenure committee.”
Kilborn said he was compelled to submit to three hours of mental examination and a drug test by university doctors and a social worker, broken into two segments spanning the course of a week.
The exam question that caused the furor appears to have been part of a program focused on teaching law students how to determine the factual basis for any legal action, as Kilborn explains here,
» Read more
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped to post here, was created by citizen scientist Thomas Thomopoulo from a Juno image taken during its 16th close pass of Jupiter in 2018. To bring out the different colors of the clouds he enhanced the resolution and color contrast.
We have no scale, but I would guess the distances seen exceed several thousand miles. The area covered is what is called Jupiter’s South South Temperate Belt, the visible belt at about 40 degrees south latitude that circles the South Polar Region (which is the darker purple swirls in the bottom left). This belt is difficult to observe from Earth because of its high latitude, with the curve of Jupiter’s limb beginning to bend away from view.
