Category: Points of Information

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

Boeing begins assembling second Starliner manned capsule

9:05 am

The competition heats up: With the arrival of the major capsule components to Boeing’s Florida facility the company has begun assembly of its second Starliner manned capsule.

Following closely behind the joining of the two major hull components for the Structural Test Article (STA) of the CST-100 Starliner, Boeing and NASA are marking the arrival of the upper dome, one half of the Starliner pressure vessel, for the second Starliner module. The three components will undergo separate outfitting operations in the Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility (C3PF) where wiring lines, avionics and other systems will be installed and tested before the pieces are connected to form a complete Starliner.

This second Starliner module is known to Boeing as Spacecraft 1. Once completed inside C3PF, Starliner Spacecraft 1 will be outfitted with electrical and fluid systems before engineers will attach the outer thermal protection shielding and the base heat shield that will eventually protect crewmembers during re-entry. Starliner Spacecraft 1 will be used in the pad abort test to validate that the launch abort system will be able to lift astronauts away from danger in the event of an emergency during launch.

The article provides good detail about the upcoming Starliner test schedule.

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RINO Ellmers loses in North Carolina

7:34 pm

Despite an endorsement from Donald Trump, Representative Renee Ellmers (R-North Carolina), who had been elected as a tea party conservative but became a very moderate Republican with strong allies in the Democratic Party once in power, has been soundly defeated in her primary today.

The Republican who replaces her is a moderate conservative. Moreover, he apparently has been more honest about his positions.

In related news, the conservative with ties to the House Freedom Caucus that John Boehner opposed has won the special election for Boehner’s House seat.

We must remember and continually repeat Milton Friedman’s words, and make them happen:

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

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Journalist demands murder of legislators who disagree with him

2:14 pm

Fascist: Because the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill supporting the market-based charter school concept in Michigan, a Detroit Free Press columnist has called for the murder of those legislators because he disagrees with them.

“We really ought to round up the lawmakers who took money to protect and perpetuate the failing charter-school experiment in Detroit, sew them into burlap sacks with rabid animals, and toss them into the Straits of Mackinac,” wrote Stephen Henderson.

You can read his whole column here. He makes some vague arguments against charter schools, but mostly he rants at the nerve of these Republicans to pass a law he thinks is a mistake. Which of course means he should have the right to assassinate them.

And the left dares to accuse the right of encouraging violence.

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New poll shows Trump barely winning Utah

11:44 am

More news on the upcoming November Democratic primary: A new poll in Utah shows Donald Trump getting only 29% of the vote, with Hillary Clinton getting 26%, and Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson getting 16%.

The article correctly notes that Utah has been solidly Republican for decades, until now.

Bear in mind that Utah is a state that Mitt Romney won 73/25 over Barack Obama in 2012, boosted no doubt in part because of Romney’s Mormon faith. Still, John McCain won Utah in 2008 by a 63/34 margin as well. Utah has not been competitive in decades, with the smallest margin in recent times coming in 1996 — a 21-point win by Bob Dole on his way to a national defeat.

It appears that a large percentage of Utah’s conservative voters are choosing Johnson, which might be their only conservative choice, though sadly he might not be much of a conservative or libertarian as he claims From this second link:

When Johnson took the tiller in New Mexico in 1995, the budget stood at $4.397 billion. When he left in 2003, it had grown to $7.721 billion, an increase of 7.29 percent a year. Of the eleven governors who filed to run for president this year (two Democrats, Johnson, and eight Republicans), only one had a worse record on spending growth. In New Mexico, Bill Richardson, Johnson’s Democratic successor, clocked in a little better than he did, but Richardson’s successor, Susana Martinez, has shown what a fiscal conservative looks like: New Mexico currently spends less than it did when she took office. It’s not just at a state level that being more fiscally conservative than Johnson is a bipartisan achievement. Federal spending during the time Johnson was in office grew at an average annual rate of 4.49 percent. Late Clinton and early Bush weren’t as successful in their efforts to fight spending cuts as they might have been, but Johnson makes them look like Coolidge, and federal spending since then has grown at an average annual rate of 4.56 percent.

One piece of good news from the poll in the first article above. It shows down ticket Republicans doing very well, despite the poor support for the party’s presidential candidate. And that really is what is most important at this point. It is essential the public vote in as many conservatives as possible to force whomever is President to move in a conservative direction. As Milton Friedman so wisely noted,

I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing.

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Insurance companies abandon Colorado because of Obamacare

10:20 am

Finding out what’s in it: Almost a hundred thousand Coloradans are about to lose their health insurance because of Obamacare.

More than 92,000 Coloradans will lose their Obamacare health care coverage in 2017 as four leading insurance companies scale back or eliminate their plans while others propose rate hikes of as much as 40 percent. Insurance holders with individual plans through Anthem, UnitedHealthCare, Humana and Rocky Mountain Health Plans will need to find new coverage for the 2017 coverage year, according to a Monday statement from the Colorado Division of Insurance.

But don’t worry. Thanks to the wisdom of the majority of Republican Party primary voters, when we vote in the November we will have a choice between the official Democratic candidate, a member of the party that shoved this monstrous law down our throats, and a liberal Democrat who thinks Obamacare didn’t go far enough.

We truly do get the government we deserve.

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FAA warns public of military GPS jamming tests

9:44 am

The FAA has issued a warning that GPS at high elevations may be unreliable during jamming tests being conducted by the U.S. military during June.

The FAA issued an advisory warning pilots on Saturday that global positioning systems (GPS) could be unreliable during six different days this month, primarily in the Southwestern United States. On June 7, 9, 21, 23, 28, and 30th the GPS interference testing will be taking place between 9:30am and 3:30pm Pacific time. But if you’re on the ground, you probably won’t notice interference.

The testing will be centered on China Lake, California—home to the Navy’s 1.1 million acre Naval Air Weapons Center in the Mojave Desert. The potentially lost signals will stretch hundreds of miles in each direction and will affect various types of GPS, reaching the furthest at higher altitudes. But the jamming will only affect aircraft above 5,000 feet. As you can see from the FAA map below, the jamming will almost reach the California-Oregon border at 40,000 feet above sea level and 505 nautical miles at its greatest range.

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National Science Foundation considers shuttering Arecibo

9:33 am

Faced with tight budgets, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is considering several options for the future operation of the Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest single radio telescope dish, including its complete removal.

[T]he NSF could mothball the site, shutting it down in such a way that it could restart (sometime in the future). Or it could dismantle the telescope altogether and restore the area to its natural state, as required by law if the agency fully divests itself of the observatory and closes it. Previous studies have said such a process could cost around $100 million—more than a decade’s worth of its current funding for telescope operations. Jim Ulvestad, director of the NSF Division of Astronomical Sciences, says the agency is still investigating, not concluding. “No alternative has been selected at this juncture,” he says. And much consideration will go into the final financial decision, whatever it may be. Some outside the agency see writing on the wall. “NSF is dead serious about offloading Arecibo funding to someone else—anyone else,” says Ellen Howell, a former staff scientist at Arecibo and now a faculty member at the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory (LPL) in Tucson, Arizona.

The article spends a lot of time talking about how wonderful Arecibo is, but never tells us how many astronomers actually demand to use it. Is it oversubscribed, like Hubble, where five times the number of astronomers request time than can be handled, or does it often sit unused because not enough astronomers require its use? NSF and the government do not have unlimited funds, and need to focus their spending where the demand is. If Arecibo is not in demand, then they are wise to consider closing it, or handing it off to someone who wants it.

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Elon Musk to meet with Defense Secretary

9:25 am

The competition heats up: A private meeting to discuss modern innovation between Elon Musk and Defense Secretary Ash Carter has been scheduled for Wednesday.

Ash Carter, the U.S. Secretary of Defense, and Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, will discuss innovation June 8 in a private meeting, the Pentagon’s top spokesman said. “Elon Musk is one of the most innovative minds in this country and the secretary, as you know, has been reaching out to a number of members of the technology community to get their ideas, their feedback, find out what’s going on in the world of innovation,” Peter Cook, the Pentagon’s press secretary said during a June 6 briefing. “The secretary’s had a number of meetings with business leaders and innovation leaders in particular out in Silicon Valley, other parts of the country, and I think that’s his goal here: to hear directly from Elon Musk on some of these issues.”

The meeting is private, which means an agenda or discussion items are generally not released. More details were not immediately available.

I am sure about one thing: This meeting is going to make the corporate board of ULA very nervous.

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The history of the stopwatch

9:20 am

Link here. The most fascinating part of this story is the recent discovery of the very first stopwatch, previously unknown, built in 1816, and remarkably similar to the standard analog stopwatches used for decades until the arrival of digital equipment.

The layout of the compteur also makes one suspect it ended up in 1816 via a time machine. Instead of inking paper, it has a silvered and frosted metal dial dominated by a large fraction-second hand like later stopwatches, and three subdials for marking hours, minutes, and whole seconds Along with this, the stopwatch has a button at 12 o’clock to start and stop it, plus an 11 o’clock button to instantly reset the dials. This is a feature common to modern stopwatches and one not thought to be invented until 1862 by Adolphe Nicole.

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LISA Pathfinder proves space-based gravity wave detection technology

8:43 am

Engineers have announced that the gravity wave detection technology being tested in orbit by Europe’s LISA Pathfinder works.

To show that the necessary sensitivity is possible, LISA Pathfinder measures the distance between two masses, both of which are inside the spacecraft. “We’ve shrunk the arm of a large gravitational wave antenna to 35 centimeters so we could show it works properly,” Paul McNamara, LISA Pathfinder project scientist, told the press conference.

LISA Pathfinder was launched in December 2015 to a spot 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. When its test masses where first released to float free in February, “the relief was unbelievable,” McNamara says. Science operations began on 1 March and on that first day the team was able to measure distance variations between the masses much smaller than LISA Pathfinder’s mission requirements, Stefano Vitale, the mission’s principle investigator, told reporters. After a month, the variations were even smaller, “very close to [eLISA] requirements,” he says.

They now hope to launch an array of at least three such spacecraft by the mid-2030s.

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Russia delays next manned Soyuz flight

5:45 pm

Russia has confirmed previous reports and has officially delayed the next manned Soyuz launch to ISS from June 24 to July 7.

They remain vague about the issue causing the delay, this time only saying they want more time to test software. Previous reports suggested the issue was with the capsule’s control thrusters.

Meanwhile, no word on whether they have figured out why the upper stage on the previous Soyuz rocket launch shut down prematurely.

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SpaceX lobbies Texas government for spaceport backing

1:53 pm

The competition heats up: In testimony today before the Texas legislature, a SpaceX official called for more government funding to support the company’s spaceport construction in Boca Chica near Brownsville, Texas.

At a recent joint legislative committee hearing held at UT-Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville, Caryn Schenewerk, senior counsel and director of governmental affairs for SpaceX, pointed out that zero dollars were appropriated to the Texas Spaceport Trust Fund during last year’s legislative session. In contrast, Schenewerk said, Florida commits $20 million a year to its spaceport infrastructure fund.

“One of the things I want to highlight for you is that unfortunately, the spaceport trust fund was not funded in the 84th Legislature and we will certainly be advocating for it to be considered by the 85th and for it to be part of the budget in the 85th Legislature,” Schenewerk testified. “By contrast, Florida consistently funds its space infrastructure fund to a tune of $20 million a year. Those infrastructure matching grants go to exactly the kind of activities that we are undertaking at Boca Chica. They are public-private partnerships for investing specifically in what is so costly an undertaking, the infrastructure.”

Obviously, SpaceX’s spaceport is going to require an increased financial commitment by the state government to build and maintain the increased infrastructure that such large operations require. At the same time, SpaceX doesn’t need a handout. They shouldn’t expect the taxpayers to pay for their private spaceport.

The article does provide some updated information about the spaceport’s construction status. It looks like they are aiming for a 2018 launch date.

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Titan over Saturn’s rings

9:35 am

Titan over Saturn's rings

Cool image time! The picture on the right, taken on January 26, 2016 by Cassini and reduced and cropped to show here, captures Titan above Saturn’s rings, which are themselves partly obscured by the shadow of Saturn (unseen on the right) that falls across them.

Make sure you go to look at the full image. This is the kind of vista that artists in the 1950s imagined we’d see once we began to explore the solar system.

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Hawaii turns down requests to remove TMT hearings officer

9:10 am

The state of Hawaii has decided to not replace the hearings officer in charge of the new permitting process for the Thirty Meter Telescope, despite a request by TMT to remove her.

There are different reasons for wanting to replace her. Telescope opponents raise conflict-of-interest concerns over her paid family membership to the Imiloa Astronomy Center. The university takes issue with her mediating another matter involving the Manoa campus. The nonprofit telescope company says replacing her with an alternate would avoid further delay.

“With due respect and consideration to the parties’ various interests and reasons for asking the board to replace Judge Amano, the board cannot and will not sidestep its own administrative responsibility to exercise judgment and common sense regarding whether the selection process up until now has objectively appeared to be fair,” the order said. “Common sense must prevail.”

The situation is a strange one. Despite the fact that the judge would likely rule fairly, TMT wanted her removed because they expect their opponents to eventually dispute any favorable decision she makes because of her link to the astronomy center. By refusing to remove her, the state is actually taking the side of the telescope’s opponents, since their main tactic is delay.

I hope TMT’s builders are making serious plans for finding an alternative site. I do not expect them to ever get permission to build in Hawaii.

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Astronauts enter privately built BEAM module

8:59 am

Led by American Jeff Williams, two astronauts opened the hatch and entered Bigelow’s BEAM inflatable module on ISS today.

Williams officially opened the hatch at 08:47 UTC. Along with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Skripochka, Williams entered BEAM for the first time to collect an air sample and begin downloading data from sensors on the dynamics of BEAM’s expansion. The astronaut reported that the interior of BEAM looks “pristine”. However, he added the temperature was on the cool side – with Houston adding they recorded 44F as the temperature at bulkhead – but no condensation was visible. He then took air samples, as is the procedure for entering a new module.

They will install interior sensors over the next two days, and then shut the hatch. The module will then remain closed for most of its planned two year stay on ISS to test its operation in space.

The article also includes some nice details about the possible uses of Bigelow’s much larger B330 modules, two of which are under construction right now.

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Trump the liberal revealed again

9:23 am

Donald Trump has made his first political endorsement, and in doing so decided to throw his support to the moderate Republican in a tight North Carolina Republican primary race.

Donald Trump has inserted himself into one of the most contentious House primaries in the country this weekend, endorsing GOP Rep. Renee Ellmers in her member-versus-member race in North Carolina. Trump makes a personal appeal to voters to back Ellmers in a robocall released Saturday. She was “the first congresswoman to endorse me and she really was terrific and boy, is she a fighter,” Trump says in the call. It is the first time this election that Trump has picked sides in a congressional race. ….

Ellmers faces fellow GOP Rep. George Holding and two-time Senate candidate Greg Brannon in a June 7 Republican primary for a new district. Court-ordered redistricting drew Ellmers and Holding into the same territory outside Raleigh earlier this year, guaranteeing that at least one incumbent will lose in Tuesday’s primary.

Powerful conservative groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Club for Growth have been working against Ellmers for weeks, running critical television and digital ads and sending canvassers door-to-door. Ellmers has also lost favor with anti-abortions groups that once backed her.

Ellmers first won her seat running as a tea party conservative. When she got in office however she became very much a moderate RINO, working with Democrats and the moderate Republican leadership to stymie conservative budget efforts. That Trump supports her once again illustrates his political position, and is a reason not to back her. To protect us from Trump’s liberal Democratic leanings we need as many conservatives in Congress as possible.

Let me add that Trump’s support here of a moderate Republican is actually provides a reason to support him in the presidential election. Though he is a liberal Democrat at heart, he is an old-fashioned liberal Democrat, not a modern leftwing ideological radical communist/socialist we now find dominating the Democratic Party. His endorsement of Ellmers here illustrates this.

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Why I won’t use Windows

9:05 am

A remote wildlife project in central Africa has been significantly hampered by the unwanted Windows 10 forced upgrades.

The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link.

And it’s not just bandwidth bills they have to worry about. “If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft’s hands,” said one member of the team. “I just came here recently to act as their pilot but have IT skills as well. The guy who set these PCs up didn’t know how to prevent it, or set a metered connection. I am completely livid.”

As I’ve noted before, I have been using Linux for ten years. Though there have been some areas of annoyance (no software is perfect), I have not found myself limited in what I need to do, in any important matter. If you’ve got a spare older computer that you’re not using right now, install Linux on it and play with it. You will soon find that it does everything a Windows machine does, without the crap.

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No sunspots for the first time in two years

10:13 pm

For the first time since July 17, 2014, and only the second time since 2011 at the beginning of the solar maximum, the Sun was blank today, with no sunspots visible on its surface.

I expect the next monthly update of the solar cycle will arrive early next week, and though I expect it will show a slight increase during the past month, it will also show that the ramp down to solar minimum is continuing unabated.

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Another Obamacare co-op fails

10:34 am

Finding out what’s in it: Ohio’s Obamacare co-op announced this week that it is shutting down, making it the 13 of 23 co-ops to fail.

The company recorded an underwriting loss of $80 million in 2015 despite the $129 million in taxpayer-backed loans granted to the co-op by the federal government. InHealth Mutual was also placed under “enhanced oversight,” one of three tools the Department of Health and Human Services has to monitor co-ops in financial distress. When a co-op is placed under enhanced oversight, it means the company is consistently underperforming and allows the department to give detailed and more frequent reviews of the loan recipient’s operations and financial status. According to Columbus Business First, medical claims were coming in at a rate of $3 million per week and the company would have had to raise premiums by 60 percent in 2017 to keep up. If InHealth Mutual were to stay in business through the end of 2016, projections show that the company would have posted losses of $20 million.

Ohio’s failed co-op is added to the list of 12 co-ops that have already failed in Arizona, Michigan, Utah, Kentucky, New York, Nevada, Louisiana, Oregon, Colorado, Tennessee, South Carolina, and a co-op that served both Iowa and Nebraska. [emphasis mine]

Gee, it sure would have been helpful if, before Obamacare was shoved down our throats by Obama and the Democratic Party, there had been someone to point out that this Obamacare co-op model could not work financially and was bound to fail. Oh wait! Wasn’t that exactly what every conservative pundit and politician was saying back in 2010?

Obviously, this all means we must vote Democratic again, as they are the only ones who really know what must be done!

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Liberal editor calls for riots against Trump

10:12 am

Fascist: An editor at the liberal news website Vox is calling for more riots and violence against Donald Trump and his supporters.

Vox’s “deputy first person editor” Emmet Rensin took to Twitter last night to declare that, since Trump is a racist and a fascist (in Rensin’s opinion, at least), then all forms of violence short of murder have become completely legitimate.

I hope the trend is becoming obvious to everyone: Despite their claims, it is the left and the Democratic Party who support more violence against people who are merely exercising their first amendment rights to free speech.

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FEC Democrats vote to punish Republican for a political joke

10:02 am

Fascists: Two Democrats on the Federal Election Commission have voted to punish a Republican presidential candidate for cracking a joke.

Over mocking objections from their own staff, two top Democrats on the politically divided Federal Election Commission voted to investigate one-time Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee for joking that he hoped supporters would shower him with million dollar contributions.

In the latest display of FEC Democratic efforts to regulate speech and target Republicans, Commissioners Ann Ravel and Ellen Weintraub backed a complaint against Huckabee, who made the joke during his May 2015 presidential candidacy announcement.

The vote failed, because all three Republicans and one Democrat on the commission voted to dismiss the complaint. However, the vote does tell us that two-thirds of the Democrats on this government panel — designed to regulate federal elections — believe it is proper to regulate the actual words of candidates.

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NASA signs Blue Origin for suborbital missions

9:53 am

The competition heats up: NASA has contracted with Blue Origin to use its New Shepard suborbital spacecraft for suborbital research missions.

The company hasn’t actually won any contracts, but is now certified to bid on any of NASA’s suborbital research work, as are Masten Space Systems, Near Space Corporation, UP Aerospace, Virgin Galactic, and World View Enterprise. The difference is that of all these companies, only Blue Origin has a ship built and already flying.

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Why the Goldwater Institute sued to block Tucson space deal

9:39 am

Link here.

The fundamental reason is that the Institute believes that, in signing its deal with World View to build its headquarters and launch site in Tucson, Pima County violated several laws as well as Arizona’s constitution. We are supposed to be a nation of laws, and thus government officials should not be allowed to violate those laws, even if they have the best of intentions.

I must say that, though I have no doubt that putting World Views space tourism balloon company in Tucson would be financially good for the city and Arizona, allowing elected officials to break the law to make deals with private companies is a very bad way to do it, and will in the end lead to far worse consequences.

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Falcon 9 first stage returns to port, with a noticable list

1:02 am

The competition heats up: The first stage from SpaceX’s most recent Falcon 9 launch returned to port today, showing a visible lean.

Musk said that the stage was probably OK, but there was some risk of tipping. This was due to the fact that the contingency “crush core” was used up. He described on Twitter that the crush core was an aluminum honeycomb for energy absorption in the telescoping actuator. Once the stage was within sight of land, it became clear that the booster had a noticeable lean to it, due to the aforementioned contingency crush core being used up. The ramifications of this are still unclear, but Musk’s tweet implied that the crush core is easily replaceable.

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California effort to make climate dissent illegal fails

12:51 am

The Democratic fascists in the California Senate have lost their bid to pass a law that would have made it a crime to express skepticism of human-caused global warming.

The bill only failed because the Senate did not take action before the end of its session, and could reappear agian.

Later this year, however, the same language could be reintroduced under a waiver of the rules or inserted into another bill as part of the gut-and-amend process.

And I fully expect these fascists to try again, especially considering this:

The measure was introduced amid a national push by Democrats and activist groups to use the legal system to prosecute climate change “fraud,” prompting a backlash from skeptics who have denounced the campaign as an assault on free speech. A coalition of 17 state attorneys general, including California Attorney General Kamala Harris, have joined forces to pursue climate change skeptics. At least four prosecutors reportedly have launched investigations into Exxon Mobil for climate change “fraud.”

Introduced by state Sen. Ben Allen, Santa Monica Democrat, S.B. 1161 had strong support from environmental groups, led by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

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