Very brief descriptions, with appropriate links, of current or recent news items.
Link here. The impression I get is of a very vibrant commercial industry now making a lot of money developing robots for a gigantic range of industrial and commercial uses. Most are industrial, but it is very clear that this technology is very steadily easing its way into public use.
The Planetary Society’s solar sail engineering cubesat test LightSail has rebooted its computers and re-established communications with Earth.
The mission’s primary mission is to test the engineering design of the deployment of the solar sail. They will now be able to proceed with this deployment.
The competition heats up: The first test flight of India’s prototype scaled-down version of a reusable spaceplane is expected by late July or early August at the latest.
It appears the Modi government is accelerating development of this mini-shuttle, which is essentially India’s version of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser. If they build it first, it will mean they will have the chance to grab the business that Sierra Nevada has been hoping to grab.
In the heat of competition: A variety of unnamed sources are saying that Virgin Galactic’s new SpaceShipTwo will will likely not fly for years.
This quote is especially telling:
As to when that commercial service might actually be ready, one former Virgin Galactic employee told Newsnight: “I can’t say whether it will be two years or whether it will be five… They have a huge, huge, way to go.”
So is this quote from Doug Messier, quoted in the article:
“This program’s claimed four lives already and it’s had four powered flights and they haven’t gotten anywhere near space in 10 years.”
When summed up, as Messier does, Virgin Galactic’s effort sure sounds disappointing, doesn’t it?
Link here. It does appear that the problem was a design flaw in the third stage which they have now traced to the cause of two other previous Proton failures, one going back to 1988.
They will need to redesign things, and will announce a future launch timetable in June.
This article begins by focusing on the low GDP numbers that have plagued the Obama administration, but I think this fact is far more significant:
Under previous presidents, real GDP sometimes grew massively during the first quarter. In 1950, under Truman, for example, GDP grew at an annual rate of 16.9 percent in the first quarter. In 1955, under Eisenhower, it grew at a rate of 11.9 percent. Under Johnson, in the first quarters of both 1965 and 1966, it grew at a rate of 10.2 percent. Under Nixon, it grew at 11.1 percent in the first quarter of 1971, and 10.2 percent in the first quarter of 1973, it grew at 10.2 percent. Under Ford, in the first quarter of 1976, it grew at 9.3 percent. Under Reagan, in the first quarter of 1984, real GDP grew at a rate of 8.2 percent.
But since 1984—more than three decades ago–there has been no first quarter, in any year, under any president, when real GDP grew even as fast as 5.0 percent. The closest it came was in the first quarter of 2006, when George W. Bush was president, and it hit 4.9 percent.
Note the trend downward, from 16.9% to 11.9% to 10.2% to 11.1% to 10.2% to 9.3% to 8.2% to less than 5%. The only significant other dominant social change during this seven decade period has been the steady rise of the federal government and its crushing regulatory control over all aspects of American life and business, regardless of which party has been in power. We should therefore not be surprised that there has chronic decline in the U.S.’s economic might during this time period. You can’t create new wealth if everything you do is increasingly supervised by a centralized bureaucracy that knows nothing about your business — but thinks it does.
And obviously, the solution is bigger government. Yup, that’s the answer. Just ask the Soviet Union, or Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders!
Government marches on! The Defense Department has now admitted that the improper shipment of live anthrax samples was far more widespread than they originally told us.
“As of now, 24 laboratories in 11 states and two foreign countries are believed to have received suspect samples. We continue to work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who is leading the ongoing investigation pursuit to its statutory authorities. The Department will continue to monitor the situation and provide updates to the public,” Defense Department said in a statement.
The Defense Department had previously reported labs in nine states and Osan Air Force Base in South Korea were impacted.
Words fail me.
Link here.
Despite a generation in which radical anti-crime policies such as enforcing the law and locking up criminals slashed murder rates, there’s still plenty of debate over whether anti-crime policies work.
But no one can argue over whether pro-crime policies work.
108 people were shot in New York, Baltimore and Chicago over the weekend. Many of the casualties were saved from that terrible “school-to-prison pipeline” that bedevils promising young crack dealers and instead went straight to the morgue.
Read it all. We went though this leftwing socialist policy disaster before in the 1960s and 1970s. Some cities, like Detroit, never abandoned it. It now appears the cities that did, like New York and Baltimore, are moving to try it again. Woe on those decent citizens that live there.
Then again, they voted for these policies, so I suppose they are getting the government they deserve.
The competition heats up: Airbus Safran have come to an agreement with the European Space Agency on building Ariane 6, Europe’s next commercial rocket.
The key part of the deal is that ESA and Arianespace will be ceding ownership of the rocket to Airbus Safran.
The French government is likely to approve the sale of CNES’s 34-percent stake in the Evry, France-based Arianespace launch service provider to Airbus Safran Launchers at about the same time as the Ariane 6 development contract is signed.
With that sale, Airbus Safran will control Arianespace, which means they will also own the rocket they are building for Arianespace. This is fundamentally different than the situation with Ariane 5, which Airbus built for an Arianespace owned and run by the many-headed ESA. The result was a bloated government-run operation that never made a profit.
Now Airbus will own it instead. They have already indicated that they will trim the costs at Arianespace. More importantly, with ownership will come the freedom to compete effectively in the much more competitive launch market created by the arrival of SpaceX. No need to get permission from ESA to do things.
The Russian investigation into the latest Proton rocket has concluded that the failure was caused by a design failure in the rocket’s third stage.
While it is always possible for new design issues to be discovered, I wonder why this problem hadn’t been noticed in the decades prior to 2010, when the Proton began to have repeated failures.
Rather than simply turn off the spacecraft when its funding runs out at the end of 2015, Rosetta’s science team have proposed that the mission get a nine month extension, during which they will slowly spiral into the comet and gently land.
Their proposal is similar to what American scientists did with their NEAR spacecraft, which hadn’t been designed to land on an asteroid but was successfully eased onto the surface of Eros, where it operated for a very short time.
The competition heats up? Virgin Galactic’s replacement SpaceShipTwo has successfully lowered its landing gear for the first time.
I wish them luck, but they will have to do a lot more before I will believe them when they say they are making progress.
Finding out what’s in it: Obamacare has forced doctors to increasingly replace medical care with administrative duties, much of which has been forced on them by the law’s requirement that they switch to electronic records.
The newly elected Barack Obama told the nation in 2009 that “[electronic records just won’t save billions of dollars”—$77 billion a year, promised the administration—“and thousands of jobs, it will save lives.” He then threw a cool $27 billion at going paperless by 2015.
It’s 2015, and what have we achieved? The $27 billion is gone, of course. The $77 billion in savings became a joke. Indeed, reported the Health and Human Services inspector general in 2014, “EHR technology can make it easier to commit fraud,” as in Medicare fraud, the copy-and-paste function allowing the instant filling of vast data fields, facilitating billing inflation.
That’s just the beginning of the losses. Consider the myriad small practices that, facing ruinous transition costs in equipment, software, training and time, have closed shop, gone bankrupt or been swallowed by larger entities. This hardly stays the long arm of the health care police, however. As of Jan. 1, 2015, if you haven’t gone electronic, your Medicare payments will be cut, by 1 percent this year, rising to 3 percent (potentially 5 percent) in subsequent years.
Then there is the toll on doctors’ time and patient care. One study in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine found that emergency-room doctors spend 43 percent of their time entering electronic records information, 28 percent with patients. Another study found that family-practice physicians spend on average 48 minutes a day just entering clinical data.
Forget the numbers. Think just of your own doctor’s visits, of how much less listening, examining, even eye contact goes on, given the need for scrolling, clicking and box checking.
The last point is absolutely true. I have found that with most doctors today, they spend most of my visit working their computer than looking at me. It is very bad medicine, which is why my best doctors refuse to do it. Either they have an assistant do it for them (raising costs of course) or they wait until the visit is over (which of course eats into the time available to see patients).
But who are we to argue with Obama and the Democrats? As well-meaning liberals, they know best and everyone else should just shut up and obey their orders.
Link here. She was attacked and subjected to significant legal harassment, merely because she wrote an op-ed on sexual politics on campus, and some people didn’t like her opinion. They then used the badly written Title IX law, passed in 1972 by Congress to “deal with gender discrimination in public education”, to get her, and her supporters, charged and interrogated repeatedly by lawyers.
Her accusers were allowed to remain anonymous. She was denied the right to use a lawyer. The specific charges against her were never provided in writing. And they were apparently based merely on the fact that her op-ed offended her accusers.
Read it all. Since the attacks against her were instigated by the students, who represent our future, this story will give you a good sense of where our society is heading. And it ain’t paradise.
Does this make you feel safer? The Department of Defense [DOD] has admitted it mistakenly shipped live anthrax spores to nine laboratories that are unequipped to handle them.
The facilities that received the samples did not have systems in place to protect lab employees against anthrax exposure because they were expecting to receive spores that had been killed with radiation. It is not clear how many people were actually exposed. The DOD says that 22 people in South Korea are getting preventive treatment, but it has not confirmed how many people in the United States are being treated.
The failure here was not just with the DOD. The labs that accepted the samples are also at fault.
The just completed ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array), a collection of 66 antennas located in Chile, has snapped a picture of the variable star Mira with its companion star, detecting details on the primary’s surface, including evidence of a solar flare.
Mira is a star with a mass like our Sun’s, but near the end of its life having evolved into a red giant that is shedding its outer layers. Being able to track its behavior with this kind of detail will allow astronomers to better hone their theories about the life and death of stars, including our own.
Time for many cool images! The Rosetta science team has just released to the public another batch of images from its navigational camera.
The 1776 images cover the period between 23 September and 21 November 2014, corresponding to Rosetta’s close study of the comet down to distances of just 10 km from the comet centre – 8 km from the surface – and the images taken during and immediately following the landing of Philae on the comet.
You can browse through them at your leisure, making your own discoveries if you have a sharp eye and know something about planetary geology.
Astronomers have discovered a very young 15 million year old star only 360 light years away that has a debris disk about the size of our solar system’s Kuiper Belt.
The ring is about the same distance from its parent star as the Kuiper belt is from the Sun, and receives roughly the same amount of light. Its blue-grey colour hints that it could consist of ices and rocky silicates such as those found in the Kuiper belt, says lead author Thayne Currie, an astronomer at the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii, which is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. “This is absolutely the closest example we have of a young Kuiper belt,” he says.
The best part of this discovery however might be how it was made, by using a new instrument on the ground-based Gemini telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.
The instrument, which is part of the Gemini South telescope in Chile, uses a disk called a coronagraph to blot out the glare of bright stars. That allows it to take multi-wavelength pictures of faint, orbiting planets and debris disks around stars, by recording near-infrared light from the parent star as it scatters off the debris. The researchers discovered the disk around HD 115600 fewer than 6 months after the GPI began operation. A similar instrument, known as SPHERE, began operating in May 2014 on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and has also begun to make discoveries.
Assuming protesters don’t force Gemini to close, we should be getting a lot more exoplanetary discoveries from it in the coming years.
The competition heats up: An engine that Russia has developed for its Angara rocket has now been tested and is ready for shipment to the U.S. for use in the first stage of Orbital ATK’s Antares rocket.
This new engine will replace the refurbished Soviet-era engines Antares had been using previously that had caused the October launch failure. Note also that since Antares is not a military rocket, it does not fall under the Congressional ban for Russian engines that limits their use on ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket. As the article notes,
On Jan. 16, 2015, RKK Energia, parent company of NPO Energomash, announced that it had reached an agreement with the American company Orbital Sciences Corporation, OSC, on the export of RD-181 engines for the first stage of the Antares rocket, thus replacing the NK-33 engines previously used on the launcher. The contract, worth around $1 billion, was actually signed and ratified by the Russian government in December 2014. According to the document, a total of 60 RD-181 engines would be delivered to OSC beginning in June 2015.
This deal means that Antares will likely be back in business soon, though it will still be dependent on Russian-built equipment, which carries its own risks. It also means that Orbital ATK will not be able to sell Antares to the U.S. military, limiting its marketability.
Cool image time! Dawn has now swooped down to 3,200 miles, and provided a very nice image of the cratered surface of Ceres. Though it does appear to resemble the Moon, there are some differences that come to mind if you take a close look at the full resolution image. The surface appears smoother. All of the craters appear worn or eroded or less rugged. Also, there are no mountains. The terrain resembles the Moon’s lowlands or maria, but more so.
Note that the region in this picture is tantalizingly close to the double bright spot, but does not include it. Because Dawn is still easing its way into its first survey orbit of 2,700 miles elevation, it only takes pictures when it stops firing its ion engine, which it is doing almost all the time to get where it wants to be. Thus, they apparently only had time for this image.
The spacecraft enters its mapping orbit on June 3. Expect some cool images, including the first good images of the double bright spots, shortly thereafter.
