December 15, 2020 Zimmerman Space Show podcast
The podcast for my 90-minute appearance with David Livington on The Space Show on December 15, 2020 is now available here.
Category: Points of Information
Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
The audit in Arizona
My representative in the Arizona house, Mark Finchem, send out an email yesterday outlining in detail the demands of the two subpoenas the state senate has now served on the Maricopa County (covering Phoenix) board of elections. The requirements appear quite thorough:
The first calls for a scanned ballot audit, to collect an electronic ballot images cast for all mail-in ballots counted in the November 2020 general election. The subpoena is narrowly tailored to just Maricopa County. Using the ballot images, the Audit Team will likely utilize extremely sensitive optical scanning software designed to identify phony ballots from legitimate, machine completed versus legitimate voter completed. And. of those ballots that fall into the “suspect” category, the candidate can be identified from the ballot. This means that if a ballot is found to be illegitimate, a count can be made tied directly to the candidate who claimed the vote.
The second subpoena calls for a full forensic audit of ballot tabulation equipment, the software for that equipment and the election management system used in the 2020 General Election. This audit will go deeper than just the elections software written by Maricopa County that was used on the Dominion equipment, wit will include the source code and underlying software that runs the so-called tabulation system.
The Maricopa County Board of Supervisors must answer the subpoena’s on or before 5:00 pm on December 18, 2020.
The first subpoena will make sure that fake ballots were not scanned, and if they were, they can be invalidated so that a new correct count can be done.
The second subpoena will next look at the Dominion tabulators to see if they were correctly tabulating the count. If it finds that they were counting the ballots scanned correctly, that will be wonderful news. If it is instead found that they were not, than a manual handcount will be required, and this evidence will further confirm the allegations in other states that these machines are unreliable and might even be designed to defraud the vote.
Finchem also noted in the email that if the audits find that any of the allegations are true, than the investigation will be expanded to cover other counties.
Based on this information, it appears that the Arizona state legislature is now serious about investigating the election count to make sure it was legitimate.
United kicks family off plane because 2-year-old won’t wear mask
Insanity: United Airlines last week removed a family from a flight heading to New York because they were unable to get their 2-year-old child to wear a mask.
In a two-minute video posted on Dec. 11, since removed for no apparent reason by Instagram and Twitter, mother and Colorado resident Eliz Orban tearfully describes the experience then inserts footage of her masked husband attempting to put a surgical mask on the little girl while seated in the plane. The girl holds her hands up to her face, cries, and buries her head in his arm to avoid the mask.
As a flight attendant advises passengers over the comms to stow their baggage. A male flight attendant arrives at the aisle and demands the couple “grab their belongings and exit the aircraft,” saying he gave the couple “every opportunity” to get a mask on the child.
“We’re over here holding this mask over her face,” the father objects as he cradles the little girl. The video clearly shows him holding a neck gaiter over his daughter’s mouth and nose with a clasped hand. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he says quietly.
The attendant states firmly that “if there’s non-compliance,” it is United’s policy to remove passengers from the flights. “This is compliance,” the father pleads, as the mother, holding the camera, reiterates their attempts to keep their toddler’s face covered.
You must watch the video to see how crazy and irrational this is. The father is holding her with a mask covering her face, even if it isn’t on her. More important, children don’t get COVID-19. Children don’t infect others. And the child is clearly not sick. To demand a mask on her makes no sense.
And yet, this is what airlines are demanding, even though the article also outlines further the technical reasons that make this policy pointless, including the documented claim by United that the passenger areas are already far more free of any aerosols that might carry the virus than any home or normal indoor space.
It is all empty panic and feel-good nonsense. While it can be argued that used properly in the right circumstances masks can have a limited benefit, this policy, which all the airlines seem to be following, is based on fear, idiocy, and irrationality. If anything, the misuse of masks in this situation (note in the video that the father has to hold the mask with his hands, which are a prime source of infection) might actually be increasing the spread of disease.
Election fraud in Nevada
The testimony embedded below by Jesse Binnall, one of the lawyers for Trump that conducted research into the election in Nevada, is quite shocking if true. He is speaking to the state’s senate’s Homeland Security and Government Committee at a hearing this week.
[Youtube, being a tool of the Democrat Party election machine, has removed the first upload. I have found it elsewhere.]
Part of his testimony is further confirmed by a separate investigation that found almost 4,000 non-citizens voted illegally.
Under a subpoena, the state’s GOP obtained data that showed green card holders and non citizens who had obtained driver’s licenses. From this official data set, the Nevada GOP “compared this detailed information against the county voter records in Nevada” and “discovered that 6,260 non citizens were registered to vote and 3,987 non-citizens had voted.”
The worst aspect of this is that it is consistent with similar stories and evidence in other states. Such allegations must not be ignored or simply dismissed. They must be investigated, hard.
An update on the testing of SLS’s core stage
Link here. The article provides more information on the temperature issue that caused the seventh of eight fueling tests of the core stage to abort early.
The temperature issue arose when NASA transferred superchilled liquid oxygen, to fuel the rocket, from a holding facility to the core stage of the SLS. This procedure has been modeled and verified before, Julie Bassler, SLS stages manager at Marshall, told reporters during the same teleconference. But this was the first time the transfer actually took place.
“We were actually just a few degrees different than what we wanted to see coming in,” she continued, but said the temperature must be precise during the initial phases of filling the tank. The requirement is minus 290.57 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 179.21 degrees Celsius.) But the liquid oxygen was slightly cooler, at minus 296.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 182.59 degrees Celsius).
“We filled up [the tank] just enough to pass the phase where we knew we weren’t going to be able to get the temperature to a level that was going to be acceptable to meet the requirement, and that’s when they caught us … in the testing,” Bassler continued.
Despite this issue, NASA still hopes to do the last core stage test, dubbed the Green Run, in the last week in December. During that static fire test they will fuel the core stage entirely and then fire its engines for the full duration of an actual launch — almost ten minutes. If all goes well they will then pack up the stage and ship it to Florida for the planned November unmanned test mission sending Orion around the Moon.
They have no schedule margins, however, because all the components of this very expensive and complex rocket need a lot of time to get anything done. The two solid rocket boosters that will be attached to the sides of the core stage only have a twelve month lifespan once assembled, and they are holding off assembling them pending this test. The core stage itself needs two months to be disassembled, and then two months to be reassembled in Florida. And there remain the issue of a failed power unit in the Orion capsule that could take four to twelve months to repair.
The article however had this telling quote, based on comments from a NASA official, about future launch procedures, that sent a chill up my spine:
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House passes bill that attempts to protect Apollo Moon sites
The House today passed a bill that would require any American business planning a Moon mission to agree to not disturb the Apollo lunar landing sites.
[The bill] requires any federal agency that issues a license to conduct a lunar activity to require the applicant to agree to abide by recommendations in the 2011 NASA report “NASA’s Recommendations to Space-Faring Entities: How to Protect and Preserve the Historic and Scientific Value of U.S. Government Artifacts” and any successor recommendations, guidelines or principles issued by NASA.
All well and good, but this does nothing to stop other nations from touching those sites. Moreover, making all of those sites and whatever the astronauts did there totally sacrosanct is not reasonable. On the later Apollo landings the astronauts used a rover to travel considerable distances. Should every spot the astronauts visited by now considered holy? If anything, scientists will wish to return and gather more data at these locations to better understand the initial Apollo results.
Not that any of this really matters. In the long run the decision on how much these sites should be protected will be made by the people who live on the Moon. I suspect, as pioneers living on the edge of survival, they will have less interest in making memorials to past achievements and be more focused on getting things done, now.
India successfully completes second launch in 2020
Using its PSLV rocket India today successfully placed a communications satellite into orbit.
This was only the second launch by India in 2020. At the start of the year ISRO had predicted they would complete as many as twelve launches. Instead, their panic over COVID-19 shut them down.
The leader board for the 2020 launch race presently stands unchanged, though a SpaceX rocket is on the launchpad and might lift-off in the next 90 minutes. [UPDATE: SpaceX has stood down and will try again tomorrow.]
33 China
24 SpaceX
14 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 39 to 33 in the national rankings.
Chang’e-5 sample return capsule successfully recovered in China
The new colonial movement: The sample return capsule for China’s Chang’e-5 mission, the first to bring lunar samples back to Earth since 1976, has been successfully recovered in the inner Mongolia region of China today.
Chinese officials confirmed the roughly 660-pound (300-kilogram) capsule landed at 12:59 p.m. EST (1759 GMT) Wednesday, or 1:59 a.m. Thursday in Beijing.
Recovery crews dispatched to the remote landing zone converged on the capsule in helicopters and off-road vehicles, traveling across the snow-covered plains of Inner Mongolia in the middle of the night. Ground teams reached the Chang’e 5 return module within minutes to begin operations to secure the capsule, and planted a Chinese flag in the frozen soil next the spacecraft.
Crews plan to transport the module to Beijing, where scientists will open the sample carrier and begin analyzing the moon rocks.
For China this success is a major milestone for its government-run space program. They have demonstrated superb technical capabilities that will serve them on many more future missions. They have also signaled to the world and the U.S. that they mean business in space, and that their published plans to build colonies on the Moon are serious. They have also made it clear that they will enforce control over any territory they occupy, notwithstanding the rules of the Outer Space Treaty. Any American government that makes light of these facts and refuses to aggressively compete with China is going to quickly discover it shut out of the most valuable locations on the Moon.
InSight: Mars’ crust is thin, and its interior is many layered with a molten core
Scientists yesterday released results from the seismometer on the Mars InSight lander that suggest that the crust of the red planet is thin and that its interior is many layered with a molten core.
[T]wo moderate quakes, at magnitude 3.7 and 3.3, have been treasure troves for the mission. Traced to Cerberus Fossae, deep fissures in the crust 1600 kilometers east of the landing site that were suspected of being seismically active, the quakes sent a one-two punch of compressive pressure (P) waves, followed by sidewinding shear (S) waves, barreling toward the lander. Some of the waves were confined to the crust; others reflected off the top of the mantle. Offsets in the travel times of the P and S waves hint at the thickness of the crust and suggest distinct layers within it, Brigitte Knapmeyer-Endrun, a seismologist at the University of Cologne, said in an AGU presentation. The top layer may reflect material ground up in the planet’s first billion years, a period of intense asteroid bombardment, says Steven Hauck, a planetary scientist at Case Western Reserve University.
At 20 or 37 kilometers thick, depending on whether the reflections accurately trace the top of the mantle, the martian crust appears to be thinner than Earth’s continental crust—a surprise. Researchers had thought that Mars, a smaller planet with less internal heat, would have built up a thicker crust, with heat escaping through limited conduction and bouts of volcanism. (Though Mars is volcanically dead today, giant volcanoes dot its surface.) A thin crust, however, might mean Mars was losing heat efficiently, recycling its early crust, rather than just building it up, perhaps through a rudimentary form of plate tectonics, Mojzsis says.
The thin crust provides a solid basis for explaining the large volcanoes and vast lava plains on the planet. Combined with the light gravity, magma would have found an easier path to the surface. Handed this knowledge, planetary geologists can now make a first stab at outlining more precisely the planet’s early volcanic history.
SpinLaunch expands operations at Spaceport America in NM
Capitalism in space: SpinLaunch, the private launch startup that proposes to fling payloads into orbit rather than launch them in a rocket, has announced that it will be expanding its operations at Spaceport America in New Mexico.
The company already built a $7 million, 10,000-square-foot facility at the Spaceport after announcing plans last year to conduct all testing there on its new technology. Now, the company is doubling down, with plans to hire an additional 59 people and invest another $46 million over 10 years. The state Economic Development Department will support the expansion with $4 million in Local Economic Development Act funding, said EDD Secretary Alicia J. Keyes.
…Under its expansion, the company plans to actually build the centrifuge launch system at the spaceport, with test launches to start next year. “We expect by next summer to begin flight test operations at the spaceport, and we expect to continue to test new flight designs there for the foreseeable future,” Yaney told the Journal. “We see it as a permanent facility for us.”
The idea is fascinating, but I have some doubts. First, the accelerations will be so high that it might limit the company’s customer base, since many satellites will likely not be able to withstand those forces.
If it works, however, the company will have found a truly clever way to eliminate entirely the need for a first stage, and maybe even the second stage.
ESA funds ArianeGroup prototype vertical landing hopper
The European Space Agency (ESA) has now committed 33 million euros for ArianeGroup to develop a prototype vertical landing hopper dubbed Themis that would begin testing first stage landings by ’23.
ArianeGroup and its collaborators in Belgium, Switzerland, France and Sweden offer critical technical knowhow gained through the development of Europe’s next-generation engine – Prometheus – which will power Themis.
ESA’s Prometheus is a highly versatile engine capable of providing 1000 kN of variable thrust and is reignitable which makes it suitable for core, booster and upper stage application. An onboard computer handles engine management and monitoring in real time – a crucial feature for reusability.
ArianeGroup is the private consortium led by Airbus and Safran that is building Ariane 6. This deal suggests that ESA amd ArianeGroup has finally recognized that Ariane 6, built without reusability, is a lemon and is not attracting customers. This new contract starts the process of developing a reusable first stage.
They still might be too late. They will only begin testing the Themis prototype in ’23, with no clarity on when a full scale version will follow. Meanwhile, it is very likely that SpaceX’s fully reusable Starship/Super Heavy will be flying orbital missions by then, and likely charging far less than they presently do for their Falcon 9.
Cones on Mars!
Today’s cool image is actually a bunch, all found recently in the monthly image download from the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
All the photos I post below show pimple-like cones, all of which appear to be a type of small volcano. The cones are found in a wide range of locations, from the northern lowland plains to the cratered highlands to the mid-latitude transition zone between the two. They are also found at the bottom of deep canyons, in the floors of craters, and amidst mountains.
Let us begin.
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