October 6. 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Stratollite completes five day balloon test flight
Capitalism in space: World View’s first test flight of its stratollite high altitude balloon out of its Tucson launch site has successfully achieved a five day mission.
The vehicle hovered between 55,000 and 75,000 feet, while successfully testing out equipment designed to steer the balloon and keep it relatively stable at the same spot. Onboard were a 50.6-megapixel Canon EOS 5DS camera to do Earth observations, as well as communications equipment from the US military’s Southern Command. The military is interested in using the stratollite to look for human and drug trafficking, as well as maritime piracy.
World View says it’s going to bring down the stratollite sometime today, after hitting all of its critical milestones. “This is an enormous leap in our development program and we are certain the stratollite is going to forge a new path in how we observe, react to and collect data about our planet,” Jane Poynter, CEO of World View, said in a statement.
It is pretty clear that World View has shifted its focus from high altitude tourist flights in a balloon to high altitude reconnaissance and research flights, suggesting that they found the customer demand for the tourist flights at $75,000 each to be weak.
TeamIndus still searching for funds for Google Lunar X-Prize mission
Capitalism in space: TeamIndus, one of the five finalists in the Google Lunar X-Prize mission, is still searching for the funds it needs to pay for its launch.
Bengaluru-based aerospace start-up TeamIndus is scouting for funds and sponsors to build a spacecraft with a rover for landing and exploring the lunar surface. “The total budget of the moon mission is about Rs 450 crore, out of which we have raised more than half (Rs 225 crore) and have spent. We’re trying to accumulate the rest through sponsors and others interested in this mission,” TeamIndus Fleet Commander Rahul Narayan told reporters here on Thursday.
They have a contract to launch on India’s PSLV rocket, but have been trying to raise the funds needed to pay for it now for months. In July they had raised half the needed funds. Though this article says they have raised more than half (in Indian money: Rs 225 crore), that number remains half of the total budget listed (Rs 450 crore). From this it appears they have not yet found any additional sponsorship.
MDA becomes Maxar
Capitalism in space: The space company MDA has acquired DigitalGlobe and reorganized itself under the new name Maxar Technologies.
The acquisition and name change appears to be part of a strategy to make this long time Canadian company an international company able to do U.S. military missions.
MDA undertook a major corporate reorganization in May 2016 as part of its “U.S. Access Plan” strategy, including the appointment of Mr. Lance and the formation of SSL MDA Holdings, Inc., with its headquarters in San Francisco, which manages and controls all of the Company’s operations across Canada, the U.S. and internationally. This process was completed under the guidance and approval of the U.S. Department of Defense, whereby SSL MDA Holdings operates under a Security Control Agreement. This structure allows the Company to pursue and execute U.S. government programs that require security clearances.
Maxar’s SSL division is the one building a satellite servicing mission for DARPA, and has been sued (unsuccessfully) by Orbital ATK for getting favorable treatment by the government, including federal monies, even though it is a foreign company. This reorganization apparently is aimed at eliminating Maxar’s foreign status in the U.S.
The name change also succeeds in making the company more marketable. MDA, which stands for MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd, always sounded like an accountant firm. Maxar is much better.
October 4, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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ArianeGroup struggles with the concept of reusability
Capitalism in space: ArianeGroup, the company building ESA’s next generation rocket Ariane 6, is debating when and if it should introduce reusability into its design.
[Patrick Bonguet, head of the Ariane 6 program,] said ArianeGroup is studying reusability with Prometheus “in order to be sure to take the right path at the right moment.” Those efforts are mostly to prevent Europe from being caught flat-footed in the wake of other reusable launch systems, namely from SpaceX and now also Blue Origin.
Reusability is far from a primary focus, however. “We still have not understood, would we save money by reusing? At least with our launch rate?” he asked. “We hope to launch 12 times a year. If we reuse 12 times, that means we only manufacture one time per year. It is difficult for us to have that.”
Bonguet said reusability would essentially erase the production efficiencies ArianeGroup is striving for, starving the Ariane 6 industrial base of the work upon which it relies. A smaller tip-toe into reusability could come through salvaging Ariane 6’s payload fairings. Swiss manufacturer Ruag Space is developing reusable fairings, which Bonguet said are of interest to ArianeGroup.
I guarantee that by the mid-2020s they will entirely be “caught flat-footed” if they have not begun by then the use of reusable rockets.
Atomik Harmonik – Turbo Polka
An evening pause: An ABBA-inspired group from Slovenia doing a very modern version of the polka. The song might be in English, but it doesn’t really matter. Yee-hah!
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
Democratic congressmen falsified records says computer man Awan
Imran Awan, the computer expert hired by Democrat who is now charged with bank fraud, is saying that the Democratic representatives with whom he worked systematically falsified records to encourage theft.
If members or senior staff instructed IT aides to misrepresent how budgets were spent, that could potentially explain why officials have not charged the Awans with crimes related to procurement, even a full year after House authorities gathered documentation showing invoices that claimed expensive technological items cost $499 instead of their true price: potentially an open-and-shut violation. “The only reason you’re not seeing charges is because the Democrats who employed him are not cooperating,” a senior Republican congressional official with direct knowledge of the probe told TheDCNF last month.
The scale of this scandal continues to grow.
A new Zimmerman op-ed at The Federalist
The Federalist has published another op-ed by me today: How Trump Can Drain The Space Swamp That Wants To Engulf Him. The key paragraphs:
Right now it appears, based on these news stories, that the Trump administration is gearing up to do the same, with Trump’s grand achievement being a lunar space station, to be built by the mid-2020s, with a possible specific goal of 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
Whether this lunar space station concept makes sense is a subject for a different column. The point here is that it appears that the international community and the big space contractors are all converging on this concept, and are making a big push to convince the Trump administration to endorse it.
Based on this pressure, I fully expect Trump to make this endorsement. However, the key to understanding whether Trump is the revolutionary figure he and many of his supporters claim him to be will be how he frames such a declaration.
If he ties it to continuing funding for SLS, he will prove that he is part of the problem, not the solution. SLS is simply too expensive and unwieldy. No nation can seriously mount the manned exploration and settlement of the solar system upon it.
For Trump to adopt it as the core of his lunar space station proposal would mean that his goal has nothing to do with making America great again. Instead, the goal will be the continuing distribution of pork to Congressional districts and to our international partners, as we have seen now for the past twelve years since SLS/Orion was first proposed in 2004. Nothing has flown, but each year Congress has made sure that about $4 billion was distributed to these players.
Trump does have other options, however, even if they include building a space station orbiting the Moon….
Read it all. The first meeting of the National Space Council is about to begin. From the speaker list, it appears that the Trump administration just might be entertaining those other options.
Note: Rand Simberg makes some similar points in his own op-ed yesterday.
October 3, 2017 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
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GAO finds issues in management of DOE space nuclear fuel program
A new Government Accountability Office (GAO) report has found that though the Department of Energy has made good progress in re-establishing a domestic capability for providing NASA with Plutonium-238 as a nuclear power source for its deep space missions, the management of the program has continuing problems.
The report’s [pdf] introduction described the issues so vaguely I was left somewhat baffled. Here’s just part of it:
Moreover, while DOE has adopted a new approach for managing the Supply Project and RPS production—based on a constant production approach—the agency has not developed an implementation plan that identifies milestones and interim steps that can be used to demonstrate progress in meeting production goals and addressing previously identified challenges. GAO’s prior work shows that plans that include milestones and interim steps help an agency to set priorities, use resources efficiently, and monitor progress in achieving agency goals. By developing a plan with milestones and interim steps for DOE’s approach to managing Pu-238 and RPS production, DOE can show progress in implementing its approach and make adjustments when necessary. Lastly, DOE’s new approach to managing the Supply Project does not improve its ability to assess the potential long-term effects of challenges DOE identified, such as chemical processing and reactor availability, or to communicate these effects to NASA.
It sounds like DOE has taken a very lax approach to getting this done, and the GAO is noting this, but doing so in as gentle a way as possible.
Mars Odyssey makes its first observations of Phobos
Sixteen years after entering Mars orbit Mars Odyssey finally made its first observations of the Martian moon Phobos last week.
Since Odyssey began orbiting the Red Planet in 2001, THEMIS has provided compositional and thermal-properties information from all over Mars, but never before imaged either Martian moon. The Sept. 29 observation was completed to validate that the spacecraft could safely do so, as the start of a possible series of observations of Phobos and Deimos in coming months.
In normal operating mode, Odyssey keeps the THEMIS camera pointed straight down as the spacecraft orbits Mars. In 2014, the spacecraft team at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, Denver; and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California; and the THEMIS team at Arizona State University, Tempe, developed procedures to rotate the spacecraft for upward-looking imaging of a comet passing near Mars. The teams have adapted those procedures for imaging the Martian moons.
The data from this particular observation is less significant than the fact that the spacecraft can now do it. Expect some new results about the Martian moons in the coming months.
Fannie Mae’s new headquarters included $250K chandelier
Government in action! In building its new gold-plated Washington headquarters, officials at Fannie Mae made sure they had the best, spending about $32 million in questionable expenses, including a chandelier that cost $250,000, according to an inspector general report.
The inspector general for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which acts as a conservator for the mortgage lender, recently noted $32 million in questionable costs in an audit for Fannie Mae’s new headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. Fannie Mae will be the flagship of Midtown Center, which is scheduled to complete construction in June 2018. The inspector general reported that costs for the new headquarters have “risen dramatically,” to $171 million, up from $115 million when the consolidated headquarters was announced in 2015.
The inspector general blamed expensive upgrades for cost overruns, such as a third glass walkway costing $2 million to connect Fannie Mae buildings, $1.2 million for “decorative wood slatted ceilings,” decorative wood “lunch huts,” and pergolas, or garden-style pavilions, in elevator lobbies. FHFA officials have had poor oversight of the project, according to the inspector general, because they “did not review whether any of the major upgrades were cost-effective or whether lower cost alternatives were available.”
Among the upgrades: a $250,000 chandelier that no one was quite sure what it was for.
Read the whole article. It outlines some disgusting corruption in Washington that is unfortunately now the norm.
The Las Vegas shooting, based on police radio communications
This detailed analysis of the police radio traffic during the Las Vegas shooting dispels many of the absurd rumors about what happened, based on actual data.
I spent some time today listening to the audio feed of the police radio traffic for about 90 minutes following the start of the active killer event on Sunday night. If you are interested in active killer response, either from the police or armed citizen perspective, this audio is pure gold. In general, the police had a stellar response. Being able to hear how it played out is an incredible resource for anyone studying the topic.
This article is primarily written for my police readers, but has some very important insights for my armed citizen readers as well.
The post includes the full audio if you wish to hear it yourself. One tidbit that news reports are not covering: “It appears that the shooter had stopped firing by the time the officers isolated him to his room. Most likely, patrol officers would have forced entry into the room if the killer had been firing on their arrival.” This is only about eleven minutes after the first 911 call.
The story of Sputnik
On this, the 60th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik, the first human-made satellite, Anatoly Zak has posted a detailed history of that launch, written from a Russian perspective.
More strange behavior from Tabby’s Star
Astronomers reviewing past data of KIC 8462852, known as Tabby’s Star to the public, have discovered that not only has it been dimming in a variety of inexplicable ways, it also has brightened twice in a manner that eliminates all past theories for its behavior, including alien megastructures.
The latest findings from Carnegie’s Josh Simon and Benjamin Shappee and collaborators take a longer look at the star, going back to 2006—before its strange behavior was detected by Kepler. Astronomers had thought that the star was only getting fainter with time, but the new study shows that it also brightened significantly in 2007 and 2014. These unexpected episodes complicate or rule out nearly all the proposed ideas to explain the star’s observed strangeness.
Up until now, all the changes to the star had involved dimming, though in ways that did not fit any present theory of stellar evolution. Thus, astronomers theorized that the dimming was caused by something moving in front of the star, from comets to dust to alien structures. This new data of two significant brightening events makes all those theories invalid.
Update: More news about Tabby’s Star: Using two space telescopes as well as amateur telescopes on the ground scientists have determined that the dimming must come from an uneven dust cloud.
Viewing options for first National Space Council meeting
Keith Cowing of NASAWatch has located details about the time and video viewing opportunities for Thursday’s first public meeting of the National Space Council.
The event will be streamed online on NASA TV and via Whiteouse.gov starting around 10:00 am. The event itself is only 2 to 2.5 hours long (not mentioned on the advisory).
…There is nothing online anywhere to suggest that the public can attend this event so it looks like it is going to be an expensive photo op with only a select few actually in attendance listening to pre-written statements being read before the cameras. The expense of taking over a large portion of a busy museum seems to be for the purpose of providing impressive backdrops for a meeting that is mostly show and little substance.
The advisory still provides no details about speakers.
First Flight
The last part in Doug Messier’s series on the commercial aviation/space history, First Flight, is now available.
Messier brings his history of Virgin Galactic up to the present, and then compares their efforts to build a reusable suborbital spacecraft with that of Blue Origin and its New Shepard design. For Virgin Galactic, the comparison does not reflect well upon them. While fourteen years have passed since the company began its so far unsuccessful effort to reach suborbital space, Blue Origin has already done it multiple times, with a reusable ship. And it took Blue Origin about half the time to make that happen.
Sierra Nevada and Canada sign agreement for using Dream Chaser
Capitalism in space: Sierra Nevada has signed an agreement with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) to study ways in which Canada might utilize the company’s reusable Dream Chaser spacecraft.
This agreement is very preliminary, with no apparent specific plans announced nor any exchange of money. It is however another signal of the strong interest that foreign governments have in buying time on Dream Chaser, once it is operational.
Nobel Prize for Physics awarded to three LIGO scientists
The 2017 Nobel Prize for Physics has been awarded to three scientists involved in the development of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO), which detected the first gravitational waves in 2015.
While some of the recent Nobel Prizes have been absurd (such as the Peace award to Obama), this award is absolutely deserved and appropriate. Until LIGO detected that gravitational wave they were merely a theory. The detection proved the theory to be real.