Category: Points of Information

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

JPL requests proposals from the private sector for Mars exploration

9:44 am

Capitalism in space: JPL, which is the lead agency running NASA’s very troubled Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission, has now issued a request for proposals from the private sector for doing a variety of Mars missions.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory issued a request for proposals Jan. 29 for “commercial service studies” for future robotic Mars mission concepts. The studies, with a value of $200,000 or $300,000, would be carried out over 12 weeks. The studies are intended to examine four specific design reference missions to explore commercial opportunities to support Mars exploration: delivery of small payloads of up to 20 kilograms to Mars orbit, delivery of large payloads of up to 1,250 kilograms to Mars orbit, services to provide high-resolution imaging of the Martian surface and communications relay services between Mars and Earth.

Missions to provide imaging or communications from Mars orbit could quite easily be provided by numerous private companies. Delivering payloads to the Martian service is exactly what SpaceX proposes with Starship, and is also what several lunar lander companies have now been doing.

Up until now, JPL has always built everything in-house, or if it didn’t it designed and managed everything very closely. The result with MSR is a project that is now poorly managed, vastly over budget and behind schedule, and very likely to fail. This proposal suggests JPL is now recognizing that private enterprise might be able to do it better, as NASA has now proven with its shift from being the builder to becoming merely a customer.

If so, this proposal might be indicating the first step at JPL and NASA in imposing a major change in MSR itself, coming as it does just days after the release of an inspector general report about that project’s many problems.

3 comments

Texas approves SpaceX land swap

9:31 am

Despite a concerted effort by a small group of activists to stop it, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission yesterday approved a proposed land swap that would give SpaceX 43 acres of state park land in exchange for receiving 477 acres in a nearby wildlife refuge.

The commission said that the land swap “would create a tenfold return,” allowing the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department to begin planning for a new state park that would give the public access to fishing, kayaking, hiking and other outdoor activities.

…The 43 acres it would give to SpaceX are “noncontiguous,” with the commission noting that most of the acres “do not connect to each other or to areas offering public access at Boca Chica State Park.”

“These smaller, noncontiguous tracts do not provide beach access and are dotted among private properties or immediately adjacent to SpaceX’s facilities, meaning they aren’t readily available for public use and provide less cohesive wildlife habitat than offered by a connected and consistently managed tract of conservation land,” the announcement reads.

The opposition came from the same activist groups that have been attempting by lawfare in every way to shut SpaceX down. They claim in the article at the link that “SpaceX has a history of being a bad neighbor, wreaking havoc on the communities and habitat nearby,” but there is zero evidence of this. Even Fish & Wildlife was forced in its own environmental report to admit that there was no reason to block Starship/Superheavy launches at Boca Chica. And the general community is enthused about the presence of SpaceX because of the billions of dollars of new investment and tens of thousands of new jobs it has brought to the Brownsville region.

These activist groups are simply another visible expression of the irrational hatred the left now holds for Elon Musk, because he has dared defy the left in a number of ways. Sadly, these groups routinely get strong help from every media source (also part of that left), always getting quoted and always getting treated as if they are a major political force in the region, when only a tiny minority in south Texas is on their side.

2 comments

The beat goes on: SpaceX launches twice today

5:36 pm

UPDATE: This post is changed because I missed an earlier launch today from SpaceX, when it launched 53 payloads, including many smallsats using its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California. It then followed with a successful launch of another 23 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.

On the Vandenberg launch, the first stage successfully completed its fifth flight, landing back at its landing zone at Vandenberg. In the Cape Canaveral launch, the first stage completed its thirteenth flight. landing on a droneship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

22 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined 25 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX now leads the rest of the world, excluding American companies 22 to 19.

11 comments

Real pushback: Faced with a legal requirement to end its DEI programs, University of Florida shuts them down

12:34 pm

Martin Luther King Jr
A real victory for Martin Luther King Jr

Bring a gun to a knife fight: In the past year there have been a variety of bills in state legislatures attempting to rein in or eliminate the racist Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs and departments at state universities. Some have been relatively weak feel-good, failure theater efforts, such as those that merely “ban” the teaching of these ideas, something that the leftist academics in charge easily get around by simply renaming the programs.

Other states imposed stronger legislation, threatening to cut the budgets of these colleges if they didn’t eliminate the programs. A few states have actually followed through.

Florida however took the strongest action under the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis and its Republican controlled state legislature. It passed legislation that not only banned the teaching of these programs, it cut their budgets as well. No threats of budget cuts, the budgets of DEI programs were cut, right off the bat.

The University of Florida on March 1, 2024 demonstrated the effectiveness of this strong action.
» Read more

9 comments

In the NASA budget now approved, Congress demonstrates once again its utter bankruptcy

9:44 am

Negotiators for both the House and Senate have now released a federal budget for the 2024 fiscal year that includes NASA’s budget, and in doing so clearly illustrates by that NASA budget how utterly incompetent, irresponsible, and useless this Congress continues to be.

First of all, this budget is for this fiscal year, that actually began six months ago in October 2023. That Congress can’t come up with a budget on time has not only become routine, those budgets continue to arrive later and later, or not at all.

The budget itself was an attempt to fix things, because it actually is a detailed budget made up of six appropriation bills that the House began developing last year, rather than a massive omnibus bill that no one had reviewed or read. The goal with each bill was to reduce actual spending across the board — as much as 28.8% — not simply slow the growth of that spending.

However, that effort this year has been a failure. The use of continuing resolutions to keep the government running at previously high levels for the first six months of this fiscal year has largely defeated that effort. Do not expect the budget to shrink in 2024 in any major manner at all.

The budget for NASA also gives us a good window into Congress’s bankruptcy.
» Read more

6 comments

SpaceX successfully launches four NASA astronauts to ISS

9:17 pm

SpaceX tonight successfully launched four NASA astronauts to ISS, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral on the company’s eighth operational manned mission for NASA, and the thirteenth overall manned mission launched by SpaceX since May 2020.

The Dragon capsule, Endeavour, is flying its fifth manned flight. The first stage completed its first flight, landing back at Cape Canaveral. The crew is expected to dock with ISS on March 5, 2024. The crew is scheduled to fly a standard six month mission.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

20 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise now leads the entire world combined 23 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX now leads the rest of the world, excluding American companies 20 to 19.

11 comments

Watch video from Varda’s return capsule as its comes back to Earth

9:42 am

I have embedded below video taken from inside the capsule of the commercial startup Varda from its release from the Rocket Lab service module throughout its descent back to Earth.

The capsule had been launched in June 2023, carrying equipment to manufacture HIV drugs in space and then return them to Earth for sale. Even though the company had begun negotiations with the FAA and the Air Force two years prior for landing that capsule in the Air Force’s test range in Utah, those agencies blocked its planned return in the September of 2023, and was only able to do it last month. This mission is demo flight, with three others now scheduled.

For the video, Varda included a window looking up outside the capsule, and a camera to film everything that occurred outside that window during descent, release of parachutes, and impact on the ground. It is quite fascinating, as you can see that the capsule initially tumbles, then as the atmosphere thickens its aerodynamic shape causes it to stablize with its heat shield at its bottom.
» Read more

8 comments

German rocket startup ships suborbital test rocket to Australia for launch

9:28 am

The German rocket startup Hyimpulse has now packed its SR75 test rocket for shipment to Australia for a suborbital test flight taking off from Koonibba Test Range on that nation’s southern coast.

The launch at Koonibba will also assist HyImpulse as they continue development of their SL1 Orbital Launcher. The SL1 Orbital Launcher will use ten of the SR75 rocket motors to lift payloads of up to 600kg to low earth orbit and could be launched from the Whalers Way Orbital Launch Complex [part of Koonibba] in the future.

The launch campaign is scheduled to begin from mid-April with both companies targeting a launch at the end of April through to early May subject to regulatory approval. [emphasis mine]

The highlighted phrase immediately raises concerns, as Australia is part of the British Commonwealth, with laws based on Great Britain’s. In Great Britain the red tape from those laws has acted to stymie all launches, destroying one company (Virgin Orbit) and threatening the viability of two spaceports. In Australia there have been indications that such red tape is doing the same to new spaceports on the northern coast. We shall see if that April launch happens. If it is delayed because of “pending regulatory approvals” it will confirm that the Australian government is as much a problem as Great Britain’s.

Hyimpulse is one of three German rocket startups, with Rocket Factory Augburg and Isar Aerospace the other two. It however has been very quiet in the past few years, with the other two companies garnering the most publicity as they prepare for their own first test launches. This story suggests however it might actually be the first to fly, despite the lack of news reports about it.

Leave a comment

Lockheed Martin offers to buy startup satellite maker Terran Orbital

9:38 pm

Lockheed Martin now has submitted an offer to buy the startup satellite maker Terran Orbital for $293 million.

Lockheed Martin has submitted a nonbinding offer to buy satellite maker Terran Orbital’s 223 million outstanding shares for $1 each and pay $70 million for its outstanding warrants.

Lockheed Martin also offered to cover about $313 million of the company’s outstanding debt.

Lockheed already owns 28.3% of Terran Orbital, and uses the satellite maker to produce its military satellites, so this deal seems a good fit. It also fits the overall long term strategy of Lockheed, which has been investing in a number of other startups (such as rocket startups Rocket Lab and ABL). The company has clearly seen the future. Rather than continue working like an old-style bloated big space company, it has been using these new companies as models for its future work.

4 comments

SLIM put back to sleep for second lunar night

3:51 pm

Engineers at Japan’s space agency JAXA have put their SLIM lunar lander back to sleep on February 29, 2024 with the hope it might survive its second night on Moon.

“Although the probability of failure will increase due to repeated severe temperature cycles, SLIM plans to try operation again the next time the sun shines (in late March),” the update from JAXA read, automatically translated from Japanese to English by Google.

Like Intuitive Machines Odysseus lunar lander, SLIM’s overall mission was a success, as it proved it could land automatically within a very small target zone and do so softly enough that it could send back data to Earth. The failures and problems experienced by SLIM, such as having a nozzle fall off causing it land sideways are simply fixes that can be instituted on future missions.

Leave a comment

NASA shuts down Goddard $2 billion demo refueling program

3:43 pm

After more than a decade of work and more than $1 billion spent, NASA yesterday shut down a Goddard Space Flight Center program, dubbed On-orbit Servicing, Assembly, and Manufacturing 1 (OSAM-1), that would have attempted to refuel a defunct the Landsat-7 satellite.

This Space News article details the program’s long history:

OSAM-1 started about a decade ago as Restore-L, with the goal of launching as soon as 2020 to refuel Landsat 7. The mission was renamed OSAM-1 in 2020 with the addition of payloads to perform in-space assembly and manufacturing activities.

The mission, though, suffered significant cost overruns and delays. As of April 2022, the mission’s total cost, once projected to be between $626 million and $753 million, had grown to $2.05 billion and its launch delayed to December 2026. NASA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG), in an October 2023 report, concluded the project would likely suffer additional overruns, with an estimated cost at completion as high as $2.17 billion and a launch of between March and June 2027.

The program was originally conceived by Frank “Cepi” Cepollina, who had run the program in the 1980s to use the shuttle and standard parts on satellites to successfully repair the Solar Max satellite, and then headed the program at Goddard that ran all the repair missions to the Hubble Space Telescope. It was his correct contention that designing satellites and spacecraft with standard modular parts would not only allow for replacement and repair, it would reduce the cost of getting into space while increasing increasing profit margins.

The problem was that Cepi’s operation was a government program, divorced from cost controls and profit. Unlike the many private orbital tug companies that are now building and flying the same technology, developed quickly and for relatively little, the Goddard program experienced endless delays and cost overruns. In the end, private enterprise has overtaken the government, and made this program superfluous. Kudos to NASA’s management for making the hard decision to shut it down finally.

5 comments

Ingenuity’s final resting place on Mars

9:27 am

Panorama showing Ingenuity in Jezero Crater
Click for original image.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

Time for one last cool image of Ingenuity. The picture above, cropped, reduced, and annotated to post here, was created from a mosaic of 67 images taken on February 21, 2024 by the high resolution camera on the Mars rover Perseverance. The white rectangle marks the approximate area covered by the image below, a mosaic of seven pictures taken on February 24, 2024 by Perseverance’s Remote Microscopic Imager camera, normally used to take very close images of nearby rocks but repurposed here to provide a close up of Ingenuity about 1,365 feet away, inside Neretva Vallis. Ingenuity is on the right, and the speck on the left is the section of the rotor blade that broke off and was apparently flung about 49 feet away.

On the overview map to the right, the blue dot marks Perseverance’s position, the green dot Ingenuity’s, and the yellow lines mark the approximate area covered by the panorama above. The red dotted line is Perseverance’s planned route in the coming months.

Close-up of Ingenuity and broken rotor blade
Click for original image.

4 comments

Astronomers discover new moons around Neptune and Uranus

8:50 am

Using a observations over several years from a number of ground-based telescopes, astronomers have now identified two new moons around Neptune and one new moon circling Uranus.

The new Uranian member brings the ice giant planet’s total moon count to 28. At only 8 kilometers, it is probably the smallest of Uranus’ moons. It takes 680 days to orbit the planet. Provisionally named S/2023 U1, the new moon will eventually be named after a character from a Shakespeare play, in keeping with the naming conventions for outer Uranian satellites.

…The brighter Neptune moon now has a provisional designation S/2002 N5, is about 23 kilometers in size, and takes almost 9 years to orbit the ice giant. The fainter Neptune moon has a provisional designation S/2021 N1 and is about 14 kilometers with an orbit of almost 27 years. They will both receive permanent names based on the 50 Nereid sea goddesses in Greek mythology.

The two new Neptune moons raises its moon total now to sixteen. The orbits of all three are tilted and eccentric and far from the planets, strongly suggested they are capture asteroids, not objects formed at the same time as the planet.

One comment

Local county now in full support of SpaceX land swap

8:41 am

According to a local Cameron county judge, who had previously expressed opposition, county officials including himself are now in full support of the proposed land swap, giving SpaceX 43 acres of Boca Chica State Park land in exchange for 477 acres at a national wildlife area about 10 miles away.

A special meeting of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to vote on this land swap is now scheduled for March 5, 2024 in Austin, and it appears it is ready to approve. That meeting however should be entertaining, because it also appears that the small minority of leftist activists organizations in the area that oppose everything SpaceX is achieving are organizing carpools to attend the meeting. Expect them to perform the typical shennigans of the left, screaming and shouting and attempting to take over the venue to prevent the vote.

What these activists of course refuse to recognize, or simply don’t care, is that the change of opinion by local officials is because the local community and in fact the majority of Texans support what SpaceX is doing. It has revitalized the Brownsville area, bringing billions of new investment capital and tens of thousands of new jobs to the region. It has also demonstrated repeatedly it is being a good steward to the environment at Boca Chica, and will do much as a launch site to help preserve the coastal wildlife there, just as NASA has done at Cape Canaveral for three quarters of a century.

17 comments

SpaceX and China complete launches

10:40 pm

Two successful launches today, first from China and then from SpaceX.

First, China launched what it called a”high-orbit internet services” satellite into orbit, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichang spaceport in southwest China. No word where the rocket’s four strap-on boosters or core stage crashed in China.

Then SpaceX launched another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage successfully completed its 11th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

19 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined 22 to 19 in successful launches, while SpaceX remains tied 19-19 with the rest of the world, excluding American companies.

Leave a comment

Today’s blacklisted American: Event by UC-Berkeley Jewish organizations is shut down by violent pro-Hamas rioters

2:47 pm

Mob as seen from inside, just before they break the door
Pro-Hamas mob as seen from inside,
just before they break the door. Click for
video.

They’re coming for you next: A lecture on international law by an Israeli attorney and former member of the Israeli Defense Force and organized by Jewish student groups at University of California-Berkeley (UC-Berkeley) was shut down on February 26, 2024 by a violent protest of about 200 pro-Hamas rioters, who broke down doors, attacked attendees, and forced the university to evacuate and cancel the event.

Jewish students at UC Berkeley evacuated from a campus theater Monday night after a mass of protesters, chanting “Intifada! Intifada!” and other slogans, shattered a glass door at the venue and shut down a scheduled lecture by an Israeli attorney who is also an IDF reservist.

Several students who were attending or working the event at Zellerbach Playhouse were injured, including two young women, one of whom sprained a thumb wrestling to keep a door shut as protesters tried to muscle it open. Another female student reportedly was handled around her neck, leaving marks. A third student said a protester spit on him.

Eventually the lecture did take place, at the home of a nearby rabbi, but was only seen by twenty.

If you want to get a feel for the storm-trooper nature of this violent mob, watch the videos here and here. » Read more

4 comments

A Martian cliff of ash, flushed by wind

1:13 pm

A Martian cliff of ash flushed by wind
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on December 27, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Described merely as an “exposed scarp” by the science team, this cliff edge is actually much more.

First some basic details. The elevation drop from the plateau down to the base of this cliff is about a thousand feet. The material that forms this plateau, scarp, and its base is all volcanic ash. The thicker sections of ash has caused its lower levels to compress, harden into a kind of sandstone. Near the surface however it is more friable, and like sandstone can break apart somewhat more easily.

The prevailing winds at this site are generally blowing to the south, but beginning to turn to the east, which explains the northwest to southeast orientation of the features.

The best analogy I can come up with to explain the erosion of this scarp is as follows: Imagine a deposit of dry mud a few inches thick on pavement. Take a leaf blower and blow at it hard, always in one direction. Eventually the outer edge will break up and blow away, leaving a sharp edge, that will also retreat with time as the wind continues to blow.

Here the winds are eroding that cliff, causing periodic avalanches which dissolve into sand that then blows away, leaving no debris pile at the base of the cliff. The ridges indicate harder material, that breaks away last, which is why there are some ridgelines extending outward from the scarp in line with these ridges. At the same time, these ridges of harder ash still break up with time, as some are cut off suddenly at the cliff edge.
» Read more

Leave a comment

Air leak in Russia’s half of ISS continues and has increased slightly

9:34 am

Zvezda module of ISS
The Zvezda module, with aft section indicated
where the cracks have been found.

The leak in the Russia half of ISS continues to bleed air from the space station and has even increased slightly in recent months, though both NASA and Roscosmos say the rate of loss is tiny and poses no danger to the station’s inhabitants.

“There is no threat to the crew or the station itself,” [Roscosmos] said in a statement carried by Russian news agencies. Roscosmos’ statement followed comments by Joel Montalbano, NASA’s station project manager, who noted Wednesday that the leak in the Russian segment has increased but emphasized that it remains small and poses no threat to the crew’s safety or vehicle operations.

As indicated by the graphic to the right, the air loss is suspected to come from stress fractures in the Zvezda module, the station’s second oldest and one in which many dockings have occurred over the past two decades. Russia had suspended dockings in this port shortly after the leaks and cracks were detected, but have apparently resumed those dockings recently. One wonders if this new activity is contributing to the increase in loss of air.

4 comments

Final images from Odysseus, lying on its side

9:23 am

One of three pictures downloaded after landing
Click for original picture.

In a press conference yesterday, NASA and the private company Intuitive Machines released three pictures taken by the Odysseus lunar lander after it came down a bit too fast, skidded on the ground so that one leg broke, and then tilted over.

The first images from the lunar surface are now available and showcase the orientation of the lander along with a view of the South Pole region on the Moon. Intuitive Machines believes the two actions captured in one of their images enabled Odysseus to gently lean into the lunar surface, preserving the ability to return scientific data.

The best picture, reduced and annotated to post here, is to the right. The spacecraft is tilted about 30 degrees from the vertical. Another picture showed the broken leg on the lander’s other side. The “two actions” mentioned in the NASA quote above refer to the issues that caused the broken leg: the limited ground data the lander used to land, and its larger than expected lateral speed.

The spacecraft is expected to be shut down by today because of lack of power and the advent of the long lunar night. Company officials remain hopeful it will come back to life when the sun rises in several weeks.

Officials from both NASA and Intuitive Machines have correctly noted that this was an engineering test mission, so even these failures make it a success in that the company can use them to improve the next lander. Nonetheless, it would have been nice if things had worked better on this first flight, especially because the problem that led to all the breakdowns, the failure to turn the lander’s range finding system back on after installation on the rocket, was an incredibly stupid human error that should not have happened at all.

3 comments

National Science Foundation decides to fund only one giant telescope

8:56 am

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided that its astronomy program does not have sufficient funds for building both the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawaii and the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) in Chile, and will decide in May which one it will choose.

The GMT and TMT—both backed by consortia of universities, philanthropic foundations, and international partners—set out to build their next generation instruments in the early 2000s. But this privately funded approach, which during the 20th century produced the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes in Hawaii and the two 6.5-meter Magellan telescopes in Chile, stumbled when it came to multibillion-dollar projects. Although design work and mirror casting forged ahead, both projects failed to amass enough funding to complete construction. (A dispute with Native Hawaiians over the Hawaii site has also slowed the TMT.)

I predict that this decision puts the final nail in TMT’s coffin. That telescope was on schedule in 2015 — when construction was set to begin — to be already operational now, well ahead of GMT. The opposition in Hawaii by a minority of leftist protestors, who also had the backing of the state government (run entirely by the Democratic Party), blocked that construction even as the building of GMT’s mirrors proceeded.

Almost a decade later, while TMT sits in limbo, unbuilt, GMT is nearing completion, with its last mirror presently being fabricated and construction at its site now more than half done. It is expected to be finished by 2028, and is almost certainly going to get that NSF funding.

As I noted however in July 2023,

Not that any of this really matters. In the near term, ground-based astronomy on Earth is going to become increasingly impractical and insufficient, first because of the difficulties of making good observations though the atmosphere and the tens of thousands of satellites expected in the coming decades, and second because new space-based astronomy is going to make it all obsolete. All it will take will be to launch one 8-meter telescope on Starship and [GMT] will become the equivalent of a buggy whip.

The great tragedy of TMT is that the astronomers themselves at the project were not willing to fight that tiny minority of protesters, whose protests were based on the essentials of critical race theory that makes whites the devils and all other minorities saints. As academics trained in these insane ideas, the astronomy community accepted this bigoted premise, and out of guilt allowed those protesters to rule.

One comment

Russia launches weather satellite plus eighteen smallsats

8:37 am

Russia yesterday successfully launched a new weather satellite as well as eighteen smallsats, including one for Iran, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in the far east of Russia.

The rocket’s stages crashed in several designated drop zones within Russia and the Arctic Ocean.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

18 SpaceX
9 China
3 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the entire world combined 21 to 18 in successful launches, while SpaceX by itself is now tied with the the rest of the world (excluding other American companies) 18 all.

Leave a comment

Inspector General: Mars Sample Return mission in big trouble

4:25 pm

The present plan for Mars Sample Return

Though the audit published today [pdf] by NASA’s inspector general of the NASA/ESA Mars Sample Return mission partnership tries to couch its language positively, the conclusion one reaches by reading the report is that the project is a mess and will almost certainly not fly when scheduled in 2029, and might even get delayed so much that the Perseverance rover on Mars — an essential component of the mission plan — might no longer be operational at that time.

First the budget wildly out of control.

The trajectory of the MSR Program’s life-cycle cost estimate, which has grown from $2.5 to $3 billion in July 2020, to $6.2 billion at KDP-B in September 2022, to an unofficial estimate of $7.4 billion as of June 2023 raises questions about the affordability of the Program.

In addition, the audit noted that this is not the end, and that based on another independent review the budget could balloon to $8 to $11 billion before all is said and done. (I will predict that as presently designed, that budget will likely reach $15 billion.)
» Read more

6 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: “Progressive” leftists in Seattle can’t even take a joke, blackballing four comedians

1:08 pm

Cancelled comedians
Click for original video.

They’re coming for you next: Not surprisingly, a comedy club located in the heart of Seattle, in the very same CHAZ neighborhood (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) that leftist Antifa thugs took over in 2020 after the death of George Floyd, has cancelled the scheduled appearance of four comedians, apparently because all four were considered too moderate and not “progressive” enough for that radical community of close-minded fascists. As rationalized in an email to the comedians, comedy club officials explained:

Capitol Hill is known for its progressive values, and we’ve received significant feedback expressing concerns about the alignment of these upcoming shows with the neighborhood’s ethos. This feedback includes concerns from local advocacy groups that are deeply embedded in our community and work towards upholding its values.

Given the feedback and to avoid any potential negative impact on both our club and the artists involved, as well as to maintain the harmony within our community, we believe the most responsible course of action is to not move forward with the shows for Dave Smith on April 11th, Luis J Gomez for May 31st-June 1st, Jim Florentine for September 20th-21st and sadly Kurt Metzger on October 11th-12th as well.

The email also added most dishonestly, “We truly value the art of comedy and the diverse perspectives it brings to our lives.”

What a crock. » Read more

16 comments

Rocket Lab unveils a family of four different service modules for all kinds of satellites

9:54 am

Rocket Lab continues to expand its product line beyond just rockets, today unveiling a family of four different types of service modules, designed to provide maneuvering, communications, and power to satellites.

The four service modules, dubbed Photon, Lightning, Pioneer, and Explorer, are each designed to serve different types of satellites, from low orbit to geosynchronous. The company is also developing a larger rocket, Neutron, in addition to its Electron rocket.

Presently only Electron and Photon are operational, both having serviced multiple customers. Neutron is still scheduled for a first launch later this year, though a delay into 2025 is expected. It is not clear when Lightning, Pioneer, and Explorer will make their first flights.

Leave a comment

Update on Starship/Superheavy preparations at Boca Chica

9:41 am

Link here. After two separate but aborted dress rehearsal countdowns, the rocket has been destacked with Superheavy rolled back to the assembly building.

After two Wet Dress Rehearsal (WDR) aborts, SpaceX opted to destack Ship 28 before removing Booster 10 from the Orbital Launch Mount (OLM). The Booster has since rolled back to the Production Site, while Ship 28 conducted standalone testing on Pad B, opening with a Spin Prime test on Monday.

A March launch of Flight 3 for Starship is still possible, pending the completion of full stack testing and approval from the FAA.

While the aborts suggest some technical issues occurred that need addressing, the destacking and additional work could also be for other reasons. The FAA has still not issued a launch license, and is demanding certain actions before doing so. It could be that the company is being forced to make certain upgrades on these prototypes it would have rather left to the next test launch with more advanced prototypes.

Either way, it now appears that a March launch is possibly threatened.

3 comments

Astra’s founders slash their offer price to buy the company

9:31 am

The two founders of the startup Astra have now slashed their offer price from $1.50 to $0.50 per share to buy the company and take it private.

Kemp and London cited several reasons for cutting the share price. They included continued cash burn by the company since they tendered the original offer and higher “non-operating expenses” as the company used multiple third-party advisers to assess options. They also said the special committee, as well as customers and investors, sought a plan that ensured a sufficient cash balance to support company operations once the deal closed.

It appears that they are willing to let the company go into bankrupty rather than pay their original offer. The new offer of $0.50 per share however remains significantly below the present trading price of about $1.76.

One comment

ULA begins stacking Atlas-5 rocket for launching the first manned mission of Starliner

9:26 am

ULA has begun to assemble the Atlas-5 rocket that will hopefully launch Boeing’s Starliner capsule on its first manned mission to ISS, presently targeting a late April lift-off.

The rocket’s main stage was transferred from the nearby Advanced Spaceflight Operations Center to the integration facility Wednesday, Feb. 21, where it will await integration with the rocket’s upper Centaur stage and Starliner. The spacecraft will carry NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore to the orbiting laboratory for a short stay of about one to two weeks before returning to a landing site in the southwest United States.

The late April date appears to be a slight delay from previous announcements.

5 comments
1 … 59 60 61 62 63 … 893