Category: Points of Information

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

Today’s blacklisted American: Tenured professor objects to segregated-by-race training classes at university; school investigates and punishes her

11:55 am

Today's modern witch hunt
Burning witches: What the Lake Washington Institute of
Technology wants to do to anyone who expresses an
original and independent thought

They’re coming for you next: Because a tenured professor, Elisa Parrett, made a four minute statement objecting to the segregated-by-race training class the Lake Washington Institute of Technology was mandating for its teachers, the school instigated a nine month investigation resulting in a reprimand and rules forbidding her to speak on such topics again.

The investigation included the hiring of a private investigator, numerous interviews, public humiliation, and wild unsubstantiated claims that her remarks caused widespread trauma. The school removed her from her teaching duties, and worse, doubled down on its insistence that future sessions will be segregated by race. From the university’s president Amy Morrison:
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Sierra Space signs up its first customer for its commercial space station

9:11 am

Capitalism in space: Sierra Space, the newly created space division of Sierra Nevada, announced last week that it has signed an agreement with Redwire, formerly known as Made in Space, to establish manufacturing facilities on its LIFE private space station.

The press release is vague about details, being mostly a sales pitch for encouraging other in-space manufacturing companies to consider partnering with Sierra. This in turn suggests the agreement is nothing more that a statement by Redwire that should Sierra’s station launch, it will then be willing to launch its 3D printing technology to it.

Nonetheless, this agreement lends weight to Sierra’s station proposal, which while plausible still remains somewhat vague as there is no indication on when the company plans to launch it.

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Zhurong rolls onto Martian surface

10:39 am

Zhurong's view of lander after deployment onto Martian surface

The new colonial movement: According to China’s state-run press, the Zhurong rover has successfully rolled off its lander and reached the Martian surface.

The image to the right was taken by the rover’s rear hazard avoidance camera, and shows the lander and the deployment ramps behind Zhurong.

At this moment China has released no other images of the Martian surface, nor have they revealed if they have a precise idea of where the lander actually put down on Mars. This latter information is essential for them to plan the rover’s travels over its 90-day nominal mission.

Nonetheless, it appears Zhurong is functioning perfectly. If all goes right, it will not only complete that 90-day mission but continue on for considerably longer, as have other similar small rovers on both Mars and the Moon.

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Virgin Galactic finally makes manned flight from New Mexico

10:30 am

Capitalism in space: More than a decade later than initially promised, Virgin Galactic today finally made its first successful manned flight from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The flight apparently reached 55 miles altitude before returning to Earth.

This was the first flight of VSS Unity since December 12, 2020, when the flight was aborted just one second after separating from its carrier airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, when a computer disconnected unexpectedly. Further delays followed:

The problems didn’t stop there, as in early May, a new issue crept up as a post-flight inspection of VMS Eve called for further engineering analysis to assess a known problem in the tail of the vehicle which was to be addressed during the next scheduled maintenance period. The company says that they have completed the analysis and determined that the structures are healthy and cleared Eve for flight.

Their plans are to do one more test flight, and then a “commercial” flight carrying company founder Richard Branson. Following that they will begin selling and flying tourists.

It appears however that they will have lost the race to fly the first suborbital tourist in space, as it appears that Blue Origin’s July 20th commercial flight will happen first.

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Election audit in New Hampshire confirms unreliability of machine tabulators

3:49 pm

Auditors today completed a hand recount of the votes in the town of Windham, New Hampshire and concluded that the count proves the machine tabulators are unreliable and do not produce trustworthy totals.

Hand recount finished & #’s very closely match the hand recount #’s done on Nov 12. Windham voting machine election results are confirmed to be unreliable. @WAuditors still investigating causes & contributing factors.

None of the local results are changed because of these new results, but the audit was done because a hand recount done in November showed serious discrepancies, with the hand count consistently finding more votes for Republicans compared to what was tabulated by the machines.

On Election Night, Republicans swept all four of Windham’s state representative seats. One Democrat, Kristi St. Laurent, fell short by just 24 votes and requested a recount.

But during the recount, the margin between St. Laurent and the Republican candidates changed significantly. The vote totals for all of the Republican candidates in the race increased by about 300, while St. Laurent’s vote count decreased by nearly 100.

While the outcome of the race didn’t change — the four Republican victories from Election Day were upheld at the recount — the change in vote totals raised serious questions for many from both parties.

The audit has now confirmed what the hand count has suggested. Both matched closely, but differed significantly from the machine totals, the numbers of which apparently penalized Republican candidates consistently.

They are now beginning an investigation into what caused the discrepancies. I would say above all the town should dump these machines and replace them with something that can be trusted, even if it means we go back to primitive times and hand count all elections.

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Curiosity climbing Mount Sharp

3:13 pm

Curiosity as seen by MRO from orbit
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image, to the right and cropped to post here, was taken on April 18, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). Released today by MRO’s science team, it shows the rover Curiosity sitting on top of the 20-foot high rock outcrop the scientists have dubbed Mt. Mercou. The 16,400 foot high Mt. Sharp is to the south, with the rim of Gale Crater about 30 miles to the north.

I have annotated the image to show the rover’s route both before and after the moment when this picture was taken. As the caption at the link notes, the rover is currently working its way up Mt. Mercou, a route that was not initially in their plans, as shown by the wider MRO view below.
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Today’s blacklisted American: Professor fired for reading anti-slavery novel to students

12:36 pm

Today's modern witch hunt
Burning witches: What St. John’s university wished it could do
to a Jewish professor.

They’re coming for you next: Hannah Berliner Fischthal, a professor at St. John’s University in New York and the daughter of Holocaust survivors, was immediately fired because she read aloud in her literature class a selection from Mark Twain’s anti-slavery book, Pudd’nhead Wilson, that included the “N-word”.

On March 3 she was called into a meeting with HR about her use of the N-word in class, the subsequent discussion of it and a comment she allegedly made about a Black student’s hair. Fischthal said she only made a remark about a student’s head being wrapped up during class and it had nothing to do with her hair.

She said she was also criticized for mentioning her family’s experience in the Holocaust during class.

On March 5 she was suspended pending an investigation she had violated the university’s policy against bias. On April 29 she was fired.

The school had been alerted to her terrible crime of reading accurately from an accurate book portraying the actual culture of the pre-Civil War south by at least one of her students, who apparently was so weak-minded that even hearing this word that-shall-not-be-named was ““unnecessary and very painful.” It didn’t matter to this brainless student that the book was written to condemn slavery and bigotry. All that mattered is that a word of six letters was spoken aloud and she or he was forced to hear it.
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ESA proposes constellation of lunar communications and navigation satellites

11:15 am

The European Space Agency is proposing in this decade to build a constellation of communications and GPS-type satellites, dubbed Moonlight, to orbit the Moon.

ESA is asking two industrial consortia in Europe to define what an integrated sat-nav and telecoms system at the Moon would look like.

It’ll include a constellation of at least three, but probably more, positioning-and-relay satellites to give global coverage, and will likely include some surface beacons, too, to augment the accuracy of the navigation signals.

“The target we have at the moment is that the constellation would be able to allow for an accuracy of 100m and probably better. We think we are able to get to 30m in the first instance,” explained Paul Verhoef, the director of ESA’s navigation department.

The two consortiums are the UK’s Surrey Satellite and Italy’s Telespazio.

It also appears the ESA is proposing making this system available to all lunar exploration missions, whether they be part of the U.S.’s Artemis program or China’s lunar plans. If so, it is commercially smart, as they will have plenty of customers to buy their services.

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Delays force ULA to replace Vulcan rocket with Atlas 5 on military launch

11:08 am

Because the development of ULA’s new Vulcan rocket is behind schedule, the Space Force has agreed to allow the company to replace it with an Atlas 5 rocket on a ’22 launch.

That mission, known as USSF-51, was awarded to ULA in August 2020 and is scheduled to launch in late 2022. The company had bid its newly developed Vulcan to fly that mission but the vehicle is not going to be ready on time. As a result, the Space Force agreed to allow ULA to launch USSF-51 on the company’s legacy vehicle the Atlas 5.

…Switching vehicles financially penalizes ULA. According to the company, the Atlas 5 is more expensive than Vulcan. Phase 2 provisions allow ULA to change vehicles but at no cost penalty to the government.

This story however is important because of what it tells us about the state of Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine, required by both Vulcan and Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

At this moment ULA is saying that the first launch of Vulcan is still scheduled for late this year, launching Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander to the Moon. However, for that launch to happen the rocket requires working BE-4 rocket engines for its first stage. In January Blue Origin announced it had finally completed a full throttle test of that engine after problems lasting several years, and would soon be delivering flight-worthy engines to ULA.

It is now late May, and the article at the link revealed this very significant and somewhat shocking detail buried in the text:

Blue Origin in 2020 delivered pathfinder engines for ground tests but has yet to provide a flight-qualified engine for Vulcan’s first flight. A spokeswoman for Blue Origin said May 20 the company is “on track to deliver BE-4 engines this year.” [emphasis mine]

It seems completely impossible for ULA to launch that lunar lander on Vulcan this year if it does not yet have any flight-worthy engines on hand to incorporate and test in the rocket. Worse, it appears that Blue Origin might not deliver those engines for months yet.

This story thus suggests that we will not see launches of either ULA’s new Vulcan rocket or Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket for a considerable time.

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China scrubs launch of station cargo freighter again

10:43 am

For the second time in two days China has scrubbed the launch of the first unmanned Tianzhou cargo freighter to the core module of its space station,

As before, the Chinese only said that the scrub was due to unstated “technical issues.”

They will likely try again tomorrow, but that is pure speculation. Without a more detailed report from China, we really have no idea what is happening.

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SpaceX grabbing 90% of the launch contracts to the Moon

10:37 am

Capitalism in space: The announcement yesterday by Firefly that it has awarded SpaceX the launch contract for its Blue Ghost lunar lander mission (scheduled for launch in ’23) is significant because it continues a remarkable pattern of dominance by SpaceX of the lunar launch market.

Right now, of the seven scheduled robot missions to the Moon, SpaceX will launch all but one. The full list, in no particular order:

In addition, SpaceX launched Israel’s Beresheet lander in 2019 on a Falcon 9.

Furthermore, SpaceX has won the contract from NASA for the agency’s first manned lunar lander, using Starship. It has also won the contract to launch the initial components of NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station on a Falcon Heavy.

There are other lunar missions in the works (by Russia, China, and others), but these are all the launches awarded as commercial contracts to private rocket companies in recent years. Thus, of these ten lunar missions, SpaceX has launched or is launching nine. That’s a 90% market share!
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