Category: Points of Information

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

The upcoming first launch of China’s space station

10:12 am

The Chinese Space Station

The new colonial movement: Later this month, on April 29th, China will use its Long March 5B rocket to launch the first module of its space station, dubbed Tianhe, thus beginning the assembly over the next year or so of their first space station, with ten more launches planned in that short time span.

The T-shape, 100-metric-ton CSS [Chinese Space Station] will comprise three major modules: the 18-meter-long core module, called Tianhe (“Harmony of the Heavens”), and two 14.4-meter-long experiment modules, called Wentian (“Quest for the Heavens”) and Mengtian (“Dreaming of the Heavens”), which will be permanently attached to either side of the core. As the station’s management and control center, Tianhe can accommodate three astronauts for stays of up to six months. Visiting astronauts and cargo spaceships will hook up to the core module from opposite ends. Both it and Wentian are equipped with robotic arms on the outside, and Mengtian has an airlock for the maintenance and repair of experiments mounted on the exterior of the station. Tianhe has a total of five docking ports, which means an extra module can be added for future expansion. The station is designed to operate for more than 10 years.

Much of the work on this station will be similar to the scientific research done on ISS. One additional science project linked to the station however is far more impressive:
» Read more

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Momentus losing contracts due to security concerns

9:37 am

Capitalism in space: The orbit tug company Momentus appears to be losing some of its contracts because of security concerns that have delayed FAA approvals of its launch licenses and forced the cancellation of flights.

The company delayed the launch of its first Vigoride vehicle, which was to fly on a SpaceX rideshare mission in January, because it could not complete a payload review by the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation in time. Momentus said that the FAA could not approve the payload “due to national security and foreign ownership concerns regarding Momentus raised by the DoD during an interagency review.”

Momentus now hopes to launch that first Vigoride mission on another Falcon 9 rideshare mission in June. The company said the FAA is still working on that interagency review that is being held open by the Defense Department. The review needs to be completed by the end of May for the company to keep its slot on that June launch.

The company has also lost a contract with Lockheed Martin, which though the reasons have not been stated probably relates to the same issue.

That issue apparently is the company’s former chief executive Mikhail Kokorich and its co-founder Lev Khasis and his wife. To address these concerns, Kokorich has stepped down, and the Khasis have put their shares in the company in a voting trust and will divest them within three years.

All does not appear lost however. Momentus Vigoride tug is presently the only option available for cubesats that need an upper stage to move them to different orbits, and it appears that neither Lockheed Martin nor its other customers are entirely abandoning it. They are simply playing safe, standing back, and waiting until the security issues are resolved and the FAA gives its approval.

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The anti-satellite missile the Soviet Union designed for one of its early space stations

9:25 am

Link here. Apparently a prototype was actually flown in 1975 on the second successful Soviet space station, Salyut 3, a military mission. A more sophisticated version was never flown when the Soviet’s cancelled their military space station program. However, its design was most fascinating:

[L]ittle is known about the specifications and operation of the system, but, according to the Head of Science and Research Center at NPO Mashinostroenia Leonard Smirichevsky, who introduced the weapon, the vehicle’s grenade-like solid propellant charges doubled as engines! RussianSpaceWeb.com’s 3D recreation of the displayed variant established that it held 96 casings with solid propellant arranged in a globular fashion like the petals of a dandelion around a central combustion chamber. Upon their ignition, the chambers/grenades might have fed hot propulsive gas into a single or multiple combustion chambers at the center of the contraption, producing either the main thrust and/or steering the vehicle. When the missile reached the proximity of the target, according to its guiding radar, the entire vehicle would explode and the small solid chambers would eject under their own propulsive force in every direction acting as shrapnel.

The missile had a flight range of about 70 miles, and was designed to destroy any hostile satellite or spacecraft that approached the military station.

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Four more flights for Ingenuity in the next eleven days.

9:14 am

According to MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager, the test flight campaign for the Mars helicopter Ingenuity has only about eleven days left, during which they will try to complete full flight program of four more test flights.

The helicopter’s one-month test flight campaign officially began April 3, then the Perseverance rover deployed Ingenuity onto the surface of Mars. “We have a 30 day experiment window, so we have two weeks left,” said MiMi Aung, Ingenuity’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

She said the helicopter will attempt “increasingly bolder flights” that could travel more than 2,000 feet (600 meters) from its takeoff location. “We do want to push it, and I believe we have enough time to squeeze the next four flights in the next two weeks left.”

The second flight, where the helicopter will go up about 16 feet and then move sideways about seven feet before landing at its take-off point, could happen tomorrow. The third flight, which will travel as much as 150 feet, will follow soon thereafter.

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Weather delays next manned flight on Endeavour capsule one day

9:07 am

NASA and SpaceX have chosen to delay tomorrow’s second manned flight on SpaceX’s Endeavour capsule one day because of “unfavorable weather conditions forecast along the flight path for Thursday.”

The launch is now scheduled for 5:49 am (Eastern) on April 23rd. NASA of course will live stream it, though you will have to listen to a lot of pro-NASA propaganda, even though this flight is almost entirely run by SpaceX using a SpaceX rocket, a SpaceX capsule, and SpaceX launch and landing crews. NASA’s real involvement is as a very interested and involved customer during launch and recovery, and then in charge while the crew is docking or is on board ISS.

This will be the first time astronauts will fly on a reused SpaceX capsule. Endeavour was used for the first manned test flight last spring. That earlier flight also creates an interesting human interest side story on this flight. Of the four person crew, pilot Megan McArthur also happens to be the wife of Bob Behnken, who flew on Endeavour last year.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Liberal black journalist Juan Williams for not being “black enough”

12:15 pm

Blacklists are back and PBS has got ’em: He might be liberal, a Democratic Party cheerleader, and black, but that didn’t stop a PBS host from blacklisting television pundit Juan Williams from appearing on his show because Williams was simply not “black enough”.

Williams alleges the host is on the PBS-affiliated show “This Is America & The World” and that he declined to have Williams talk about race-related issues because he was born in Panama, not America. Williams, a Democrat, said he received a note from the show host telling him about his decision.

“A white TV host recently dismissed me from appearing on his show to discuss race relations by telling me I didn’t qualify because I was born in Panama,” Williams said in his opinion piece in The Hill. “He thinks I’m not Black enough. Seriously.”

When you make race and skin color your number one criteria in all your decisions, then you will begin to make insane and very bigoted decisions like this. Ideas no longer matter. Nor does talent or skill. Only skin color determines who you like or dislike. The only thing that makes this particular example of the left’s constant blacklisting of others for racial reasons different is that it was aimed at a Democrat and a moderate leftist who also happens to not fit the exact racial measure they needed for their narrative.

Nor is this the end. The demand to judge people based solely on their race or ethnicity and the unwillingness of most people to challenge it is leading us directly to race war. Sooner or later the oppressed are not going to take it anymore, especially when some of those oppressed are highly qualified and will view their subjugation as unjust and will have the brains to do something about it.

Americans of all colors have got to start standing up and defying these bigots, loudly. It is the only way we can prevent that race war, and bring us back to the free society we have been for most of the last half century.

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Study: U.S. mortality rates suggest background radiation actually beneficial

9:10 am

The uncertainty of science: According to a new study by researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Israel of mortality rates across the entire United States, people that live in regions of higher background radiation have lifespans on average 2.5 years longer.

Background radiation is an ionizing radiation that exists in the environment because of natural sources. In their study, BGU researchers show that life expectancy is approximately 2.5 years longer among people living in areas with a relatively high vs. low background radiation. Background radiation includes radiation emanating from space, and radiation from terrestrial sources. Since the 1960s, there has been a linear no-threshold hypothesis guiding policy that any radiation level carries some risk. Hundreds of billions of dollars are spent around the world to reduce radiation levels as much as possible.

…According to BGU Professors Vadim Fraifeld and Marina Wolfson, along with Dr. Elroei David of the Nuclear Research Center Negev, lower levels of several types of cancers were found when the radiation levels were on the higher end of the spectrum rather than on the lower end. Among both men and women, there was a significant decrease in lung, pancreatic, colon and rectal cancers. Among men, there were additional decreases in brain and bladder cancers. There was no decrease in cervix, breast or prostate cancers or leukemia.

Their data “covered the entire US population of the 3139 US counties, encompassing over 320 million people,” according to their paper’s abstract.

Up until now the assumption has been that any radiation is bad, based not on research but on assumptions gained by the negative consequence of exposure to high radiation. There has been no good data on the consequences of low level background radiation, because it is so hard to gather. The time frames are long and the numbers small, all of which causes the impact of background radiation to be overwhelmed by other factors. This study’s statistical use of the entire U.S. population is an attempt to overcome these obstacles.

This study is statistical, which means it found a correlation between higher radiation and longer lifespans. Correlation however does not prove causation. The study found no direct evidence that humans health benefits from background radiation. We should therefore take these results with a large grain of salt.

At the same time, their extremely large database is quite telling, and adds some weight to their conclusion.

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Video of Ingenuity’s flight, taken by Perseverance

8:39 am

JPL yesterday released a short one minute long video created from images taken by the high resolution mast camera on Perseverance.

You can view the animation here.

Stitched together from multiple images, the mosaic is not white balanced; instead, it is displayed in a preliminary calibrated version of a natural-color composite, approximately simulating the colors of the scene as it would appear on Mars.

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Amazon signs ULA’s Atlas 5 for first 9 Kuiper satellite launches

4:51 pm

Capitalism in space: Amazon today announced that it has signed a launch contract with ULA to use its Atlas 5 rocket for the first 9 Kuiper satellite launches.

The announcement did not say when these flights will take place, nor how many Kuiper satellites will be on each. Amazon’s license with the FAA requires that it launch half its 3,200 satellite constellation by ’26. Also ULA intends to retire the Atlas 5 in only a few years, replacing it with its Vulcan rocket. This suggests that the launches will occur in the next three years.

They better. Starlink is already going operational, and OneWeb is about to. Plus several other internet constellations are in the pipeline. If Amazon wishes to compete it needs to get those satellites in orbit as quickly as possible. Internet customers don’t generally change their servers easily, tending to stick with whom they’ve got. If Starlink and OneWeb scoop up all the best low-hanging internet fruit Amazon will find itself facing an uphill battle getting customers.

The article revealed one tidbit of interest. Rajeev Badyal, Amazon’s VP of technology for the Kuiper project, was one of the managers Elon Musk fired from his Starlink project in 2018 after realizing that that management team was moving far too slowly for his tastes. It appears Jeff Bezos then hired Badyal to run Kuiper.

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Spring arrives on the northern polar cap of Mars

1:37 pm

Buzzell dunes and pedestal crater near the Martian north polar ice cap
Click for full image.

Cool image time! It is now spring in the northern hemisphere of Mars, and the first bits of sunlight are finally reaching its north polar ice cap. During the winter, as happens each Martian year, that polar cap of water ice gets covered by a thin mantle of dry ice no more than six feet thick. Moreover, this mantle doesn’t just cover the ice cap, it extends south as far as about 60 degrees latitude, covering the giant sea of dunes that surrounds the ice cap.

When spring comes that mantle begins sublimate away, with its base first turning to gas. When the pressure builds up enough, the gas breaks out through the frozen mantle’s weakest points, usually the crest or base of dunes or ridges, leaving behind a dark splotch caused by the material thrown up from below that contrasts with the bright translucent dry ice mantle.

Each year for the past decade scientists have been using the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) to monitor this sublimation process. The photo above, taken on February 24, 2021 and cropped, enlarged, and brightened to post here, marks the start of this year’s monitoring program. Dubbed informally “Buzzell” by Candice Hansen of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona, it shows dunes with a round pedestal crater just right of center. Though almost everything when this picture was taken is still covered by that dry ice mantle, in the lower left is a single splotch, the first breakout of CO2 gas that marks the beginning of the annual disappearance of this dry ice.

Last Martian year I repeatedly posted images of Buzzell to illustrate this annual process. The second image below was taken on April 4, 2019, at about the same comparable time in spring.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Anyone who is white, Christian, or male at Cigna

11:59 am

Cigna training presentation
According to Cigna’s training, these are bad things.

They’re coming for you next: Company documents as well as interviews have confirmed that the health insurance company Cigna actively discriminates against whites in its hiring practices, as well as runs training sessions using Critical Race Theory that aims at making all whites, males, and Christians ashamed of what they are, because by definition such people are automatically racist bigots.

The original story is here. From the first link:
» Read more

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Boeing confirms next Starliner unmanned demo flight delayed until August

9:25 am

Capitalism in space: Boeing on April 17th confirmed what had already been rumored, that the second unmanned demo flight to ISS of Starliner, its manned capsule, has been delayed until August.

In a statement, Boeing said that the company and NASA are projecting the uncrewed Orbital Flight Test (OFT) 2 mission will take place in August or September. That date is “supported by a space station docking opportunity and the availability of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket and Eastern Range.”

Boeing had been working toward a launch of OFT-2 in late March or early April. However, by early March, NASA officials acknowledged that was no longer likely because of delays from the replacement of avionics units on the spacecraft that were damaged by a power surge during ground tests, as well as power outages in the Houston area caused by a winter storm in February that interrupted software testing.

They still hope to make the first manned demo flight before the end of the year, assuming the summer unmanned flight goes as planned.

For Boeing, the sooner they get this capsule operational, the sooner it can start earning money by flying commercial flights. At the moment the delays have meant that SpaceX is getting all that business, with two private flights already scheduled and rumors that it will win a flight from the UAE as well. Furthermore, other commercial competitors are on the horizon, including both China and India.

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Starship prototype #15 readying for flight, possibly tomorrow

9:13 am

Starship #15 on launchpad
Screen capture from Labpadre launchpad live stream.

Capitalism in space: SpaceX’s 15th prototype of its Starship upper stage, is preparing to do a static fire test today, with its first test flight possibly as soon as tomorrow, though at present the FAA has not given its approval.

They have done tank tests already, and installed three upgraded Raptor engines yesterday. This spacecraft is a major upgrade from the previous prototypes, and SpaceX probably plans to eventually fly it higher and farther than the previous prototypes. Though no details about those flight plans has yet been released, the first flight will almost certainly repeat the previous flights, going up about ten miles, flipping sideways to simulate a controlled atmospheric descent, and then uprighting itself and landing vertical on the landing pad. Hopefully the upgrades will result in the first truly clean landing with this prototype.

Though the FAA under the Biden administration has seemed eager to flex its bureaucratic muscles and slow development, that NASA has chosen this vehicle as the one that will take astronauts to and from the Moon will put pressure on it to not slow things down too much.

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Ingenuity flies!

8:53 am

Ingenuity takes off!
For full images go here and here.

The first autonomous flight of the helicopter Ingenuity on Mars successfully took place early this morning, according to JPL engineers.

NASA has pulled off the first powered flight on another world. Ingenuity, the robot rotorcraft that is part of the agency’s Perseverance mission, lifted off from the surface of Mars on 19 April, in a 40-second flight that is a landmark in interplanetary aviation. “We can now say that human beings have flown a rotorcraft on another planet,” says MiMi Aung, the project’s lead engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

As shown by the two images taken by Perseverance above, the first flight was very simple. The helicopter simply rose about 10 feet, hovered for about 30 seconds as it swiveled 90 degrees, and then carefully descended back down. I have also embedded the video that JPL scientists have created compiling by high resolution Perseverance images below the fold.

Four more flights will next be attempted in the coming weeks.

Four further flights, each lasting up to 90 seconds, are planned in the coming weeks. In these, Ingenuity is likely to rise up to 5 metres [16 feet] above the surface and travel up to 300 metres [1000 feet] from the take-off point. Each successive flight will push Ingenuity’s capabilities to see how well the drone fares in Mars’s thin atmosphere, which is just 1% as dense as Earth’s.

» Read more

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The rovers’ view of Mars

9:10 am

The view from the top of Mont Mercou
Click for higher resolution. For original images, go here and here.

Some cool images to savor from Mars! Above is a panorama from Curiosity, created by me from two images taken by the rover’s left navigation camera today, April 18, 2021. The view is southwest towards the canyon regions where Curiosity will be heading in the coming months. Note the roughness of the ground. Travel is going to be tricky from here on out.

The photo was taken from the top of Mont Mercou, the 20-foot high outcrop that the rover spent several weeks studying at the cliff’s base. The Curiosity science team is presently preparing to drill into the bedrock at the top.

Ingenuity on the floor of Jezero Crater
Click for full image.

The photo to the right, reduced to post here, was taken by Perseverance on April 13, 2021, and looks west across the floor of Jezero crater. The high mountains in the distance are the crater’s rim. The low and much closer hill is the delta that is the rover’s primary geological target.

In the center of the picture is the helicopter Ingenuity. You can also see the tracks of Perseverance’s wheels just below it.

This will be the rover’s vantage point when Ingenuity attempts its first test flight in the early morning hours of April 19, 2021. The helicopter will head to the right once it lifts off.

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Ingenuity first test flight scheduled for 3:30 am (Eastern) tonight!

8:16 am

The engineering team for the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars have decided to attempt the first test flight tonight, scheduled for 3:30 am (Eastern) in the early morning hours tomorrow.

Data from the first flight will return to Earth a few hours [later] following the autonomous flight. A livestream will begin at 6:15 a.m. EDT (3:15 a.m. PDT) as the helicopter team prepares to receive the data downlink in the Space Flight Operations Facility at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

NASA propaganda will begin on NASA TV at 3:30 am (Eastern), but the actual live stream of the flight will not air until about 6:30 am (Eastern) on April 19th.

At the first link above the engineers explain their decision to proceed immediately.
» Read more

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Russia hands over last rocket engines to ULA

9:20 am

In a ceremony in Russia yesterday, Roscosmos’s Energomash division completed and handed over ownership to ULA six RD-180 engines, to be used in ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket.

These are the last such engines required as part of the contract. They will also likely be the last Russian engines ULA will ever buy. The company is retiring its Atlas 5 rocket, which requires them, and replacing it with its Vulcan rocket, which will instead use Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine.

Furthermore, as of September 1st, 2021 such commercial space contracts with Russia will be difficult to obtain because of new sanctions imposed on Russia by the Biden administration.

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Ingenuity successfully completes rapid spin test

9:00 am

Ingenuity’s engineers announced this morning that yesterday the helicopter on Mars was able to successfully complete a rapid spin test of its rotary blades.

Today, April 16, on the 154th anniversary of Wilbur Wright’s birth, the Ingenuity flight team received information that the helicopter was able to complete a rapid spin test. The completion of the full-speed spin is an important milestone on the path to flight as the team continues to work on the command sequence issue identified on Sol 49 (April 9).

…The approach that led to today’s successful spin test entailed adding a few commands to the flight sequence. This approach was tested extensively on both Earth and Mars, and was performed without jeopardizing the safety of the helicopter.

They have still not set a date for flight, because they might still decide, after they have analyzed fully the results from this test, to revise the helicopter’s software and upload that change. If not the flight will be relatively soon. If so there will be a longer delay to test that software fully before flight.

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