Rocket Lab and China launch satellites successfully

8:40 am

Both the American company Rocket Lab and China have successfully placed satellites in orbit in the past day.

First, Rocket Lab successfully placed two Earth observation satellites for the company Capella yesterday. This was also its second launch from Wallops Island in Virginia. The company made no attempt to recover the first stage.

Next, China today used its Long March 3B rocket to place its own Earth observation satellite into orbit from its Xichang spaceport, located in the country’s northeast but far from the ocean. No word on whether the rocket’s first stage and four strap-on boosters crashed near habitable areas.

The leaders in the 2023 launch race:

17 SpaceX
11 China
4 Russia
2 Rocket Lab

For the rest of the year, I will only list the leaders with each launch update. At this moment, American private enterprise leads China 19 to 11 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 19 to 17. SpaceX alone now trails the rest of the world combined, including American companies, 17 to 19.

These numbers will likely change later today, as SpaceX has two launches scheduled in just a few hours. One launch will place two communications satellites in orbit for the Luxembourg company SES. The other will launch another 52 Starlink satellites.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon, any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

Endless ripple dunes in Mars’ third largest impact basin

2:24 pm

Ripple dunes in Mars' third biggest impact basin
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped to post here, was taken on November 30, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The section cropped shows only a small portion of the endless ripple dunes seen in this area. The color strip provides us some interesting other details as well as mysteries. The orange indicates dust on the ridges as well as the higher terrain near the center of the picture. The green in the hollows as well as to the east and west suggests coarser materials that have settled in lower elevations. This supposition is reinforced by the orange area near the bottom of the picture where the ripples have mostly dissipated. This is a high spot, and we appear to be looking at a dusty surface. (This impression is clearer in the full image.)

The latitude is high, 48 degrees south, but as far as I know orbital images have not found a lot of ice evidence in this part of Mars.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Rhode Island school district blacklists Christian afterschool club because it is Christian

1:24 pm

Rhode Island: haven to oppression
Oppressive Rhode Island

They’re coming for you next: The Providence school district in Rhode Island has now been sued by the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) for unfairly blacklisting CEF’s afterschool Good News clubs from using school facilities for meetings,

For nearly two years, the Providence Public School District has blocked CEF Rhode Island from hosting its elementary school Good News Clubs on district school facilities. However, other organizations such as Boys and Girls Clubs, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, YMCA, and Girls on the Run are given free use of school facilities for after school programs.

Note too that the school district had already approved CEF’s Good News clubs in 2019. According to the lawsuit [pdf], filed by the non-profit legal firm Liberty Counsel:

The District approved CEF Rhode Island’s August 2019 Rental of School Facilities application, allowing CEF Rhode Island to lead an afterschool Good News Club at William D’Abate Elementary School for the 2019–2020 school year, without any facility rental fee. Forty-eight children signed up for the club, but the club could only accommodate twenty children due to space limitations at the school.

» Read more

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

 

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

Student cubesat demonstrates how to use a solar sail for satellite deorbit

10:04 am

Using cheap off-the-shelf parts students at Brown University have successfully tested a simple solar sail in space and shown how it can be used to de-orbit satellites efficiently and inexpensively.

They built a satellite on a shoestring budget and using off-the-shelf supplies available at most hardware stores. They even sent the satellite — which is powered by 48 Energizer AA batteries and a $20 microprocessor popular with robot hobbyists — into space about 10 months ago, hitching a ride on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket.

…The students added a 3D-printed drag sail made from Kapton polyimide film to the bread-loaf-sized cube satellite they built. Upon deployment at about 520 kilometers — well above the orbit of the International Space Station — the sail popped open like an umbrella and is helping to push the satellite back down to Earth sooner, according to initial data. In fact, the satellite is well below the other small devices that deployed with it. In early March, for instance, the satellite was at about 470 kilometers above the Earth while the other objects were still in orbit at about 500 kilometers or more.

Based on the data, it is expected the cubesat will burn up in the atmosphere in five years, not twenty-five or so predicted for the other cubesats launched to the same orbital elevation.

This experiment above all proves that most of the very expensive demo missions to test this kind of technology have been grossly over-budget. The entire cost of this student-built project was just $10,000, and it actually was more successful in proving this technology than a number of past solar sail projects that cost millions.

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Another study finds evidence of active volcanism on Venus

9:52 am

Changes in volcanic vent on Venus over eight months
Click for original image.

Using archival data from the Magellan spacecraft that orbited Venus in the early 1990s scientists think they have identified an active vent that appeared to change shape based on radar images taken eight months apart.

From the abstract of their paper:

We examine volcanic areas on Venus that were imaged two or three times by Magellan and identify a ~2.2 km2 volcanic vent that changed shape in the eight months between two radar images. Additional volcanic flows downhill from the vent are visible in the second epoch images, though we cannot rule out that they were present but invisible in the first epoch due to differences in imaging geometry. We interpret these results as ongoing volcanic activity on Venus.

This result is different that other research released last month that used Magellan data to identify geological features on Venus most likely to be active. In today’s results the scientists think they have spotted an actual volcanic eruption, as shown in the two images to the right. The image is taken from Figure 2 of the paper, with the changes in the center bottom vent clearly visible.

There is much uncertainty in these results that must be mentioned. The images are not optical but radar, so the scientists had to do a lot of computer processing to get the final result. They also compared this work with computer simulations to help confirm their conclusions.

The results also leave open the question of the total amount of volcanism presently active on Venus. As the scientists note in their conclusion, “With only one changed feature, we cannot determine how common currently active volcanism is on Venus.”

Nonetheless, the research using both new and archival data in the past thirty years is increasingly telling us that there is some active volcanism on Venus, hidden beneath its thick hellish cloudy atmosphere.

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

 

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Reassessed fuel measurements give Mars Odyssey until 2025 before it runs out

9:28 am

Using more refined methods for measuring the fuel left on Mars Odyssey, the oldest orbiter circling Mars at this time, engineers have determined that it will not run out until 2025, not this year as previously thought.

Mars Odyssey has been in orbit around Mars since 2001. The fuel is used by thrusters to help maintain the spacecraft’s orientation, which is mostly done by reaction wheels, or gyroscopes. We should therefore not be surprised if by 2025 engineers figure out a way to get the reaction wheels to do the whole job, when the fuel runs out.

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Virgin Orbit pauses operations; seeks funding

9:15 am

Virgin Orbit today paused all operations for at least a week, putting almost its entire staff on furlough as it seeks new financing.

Chief Executive Dan Hart told staff that the furlough would buy Virgin Orbit time to finalise a new investment plan, a source who attended the event told Reuters news agency. It was not clear how long the furlough would last, but Mr Hart said employees would be given more information by the middle of next week.

If Virgin Orbit dies, its death will be because a British government agency killed it. The company had planned on launching from Cornwall in the early fall of 2022, at the latest, and then do several other launches in 2022, all of which would have earned it revenue. Instead, the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) delayed issuing the launch license until January 2023, about a half a year later, preventing Virgin Orbit from launching for that time and literally cutting it off from any ability to make money. The result was that it ran out of funds.

Obviously the launch failure that followed the CAA’s approval did not help. Nor did the company’s decision to rely on only one 747 to launch its satellites. Nonetheless, the fault of this company’s death can mostly be attributed to a government bureaucracy that failed in its job so badly that it destroyed a private company.

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China’s Long March 11 rocket launches classified Earth observation satellite

9:06 am

China yesterday used its Long March 11 solid-fueled four-stage rocket to launch a classified Earth observation satellite into orbit.

The launch was from an interior spaceport, so the rocket’s lower stages crashed somewhere in China or Mongolia. No word on if they landed near habitable areas.

The 2023 launch race:

17 SpaceX
10 China
4 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India

American private enterprise still leads China 18 to 10 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 18 to 16. SpaceX alone is now tied with entire world, including the rest of the U.S., 17 to 17.

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March 15, 2023 Quick space links

3:45 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

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Pushback: Legal and public pressure forces California college to cancel plans to fire employees for not getting jab

12:21 pm

The board of trustees of San Diego Community College
The board of trustees of San Diego Community College

They’re coming for you next: The board of trustees of San Diego Community College in late February 2023 had been moving to fire a number of teachers and employees because they all refused for various medical and religious reasons to get COVID shots or boosters.

The policy was senseless in all ways. As Tracy Kiser, a pregnant black professor who was refusing the jab because of the risk it posed to her unborn child, noted in a February 21st op-ed:

“Last year, after a decline in enrollment, the San Diego Community College District dropped the COVID-19 vaccine requirement for students, but it has not been dropped for faculty and staff,” wrote Kiser, who also directs her school’s math center. [emphasis mine]

If the college’s trustees believe blindly that the jab prevents COVID (which it does not) and wants to protect its employees, why does it allow those employees to teach unjabbed students?

The board’s idiocy was further illustrated by Kiser’s description of this incident during one board meeting:
» Read more

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Geological evidence of past glacier found in Mars’ dry equatorial regions

11:04 am

Overview map

Scientists have uncovered geological evidence of a past glacier in westernmost end of the giant Martian canyon Valles Marineris, right at the point where it transitions into the complex chaos region dubbed Noctis Labyrinthus. The white dot on the map to the right indicates the location.

The surface feature identified as a “relict glacier” is one of many light-toned deposits (LTDs) found in the region. Typically, LTDs consist mainly of light-colored sulfate salts, but this deposit also shows many of the features of a glacier, including crevasse fields and moraine bands. The glacier is estimated to be 6 kilometers long and up to 4 kilometers wide, with a surface elevation ranging from +1.3 to +1.7 kilometers. This discovery suggests that Mars’ recent history may have been more watery than previously thought, which could have implications for understanding the planet’s habitability.

“What we’ve found is not ice, but a salt deposit with the detailed morphologic features of a glacier. What we think happened here is that salt formed on top of a glacier while preserving the shape of the ice below, down to details like crevasse fields and moraine bands,” said Dr. Pascal Lee, a planetary scientist with the SETI Institute and the Mars Institute, and the lead author of the study. [emphasis mine]

You can read the paper here [pdf]. The research specifically suggests that near surface water ice in the dry equatorial regions of Mars could have been there much more recently that previously believed. It also suggests, by the rarity of this discovery, that there is likely almost no near surface ice in the equatorial regions, at present.

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Perseverance captures a movie of Ingenuity’s 47th flight on Mars

9:36 am

Ingenuity shortly after take-off on its 47th flight
Click for full movie.

Overview map
Click for interactive map.

During Ingenuity’s 47th flight on Mars on March 9, 2023, one of Perseverance’s high resolution camera’s took rapid-fire images of the helicopter’s take-off and initial flight, from which the science team created a movie.

The overview map to the right provides the context for that movie at the link. The blue dot marks Perserverance’s location, with the yellow lines indicating the approximate area seen in the movie. The smaller green dot and line indicates Ingenuity’s take-off point and part of its flight seen in the movie, with the larger green dot its landing spot. From the press release:

This video shows the dust initially kicked up by the helicopter’s spinning rotors, as well as Ingenuity taking off, hovering, and beginning its 1,444-foot (440-meter) journey to the southwest.

At take-off Ingenuity was 394 feet away from Perseverance.

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Firefly wins its second NASA contract to land payloads on the Moon

8:59 am

Capitalism in space: Firefly announced today that it has won a $112 million NASA contract to use its Blue Ghost lunar lander to bring three instruments to the Moon, one into orbit and two on the ground on the far side of the Moon.

Before landing on the Moon, the company’s Blue Ghost transfer vehicle will deploy the European Space Agency’s Lunar Pathfinder satellite into lunar orbit to provide communications for future spacecraft, robots, and human explorers. After touching down on the far side of the Moon, the Blue Ghost lunar lander will deliver and operate NASA’s S-Band User Terminal, ensuring uninterrupted communications for lunar exploration, and a research-focused payload that measures radio emissions to provide insight into the origins of the universe.

The NASA press release provides more details about the three payloads.

This is Firefly’s second NASA lunar lander contract. The first is scheduled to land in 2024 and deliver ten NASA science instruments to Mare Crisium, the large mare region in the eastern side of the Moon’s visible hemisphere. This second flight is tentatively scheduled to launch in 2026.

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NASA agrees to Axiom’s third planned commercial passenger mission to ISS

8:45 am

NASA today announced that it has given Axiom the go-ahead for its third planned commercial passenger mission to ISS, now tentatively scheduled for November 2023.

Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) is expected to spend 14 days docked to the space station. A specific launch date is dependent on spacecraft traffic to the space station and in-orbit activity planning and constraints. NASA and Axiom Space mission planners will coordinate in-orbit activities for the private astronauts to conduct in coordination with space station crew members and flight controllers on the ground.

As NASA did in announcing its agreement to Axiom’s previous flight, the agency’s press release makes believe it “selected” Axiom for this flight, as if it had the power and right to do so. Hogwash. Axiom has purchased the flight from SpaceX, and wishes to rent space on ISS for two weeks for its customers. All NASA has done is agree to the deal, while also charging Axiom very large fees for that rental.

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SpaceX launches cargo Dragon to ISS

5:43 pm

Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to put a cargo Dragon capsule into orbit and on its way to ISS.

The first stage successfully completed its seventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The Dragon freighter is making its third flight, and will dock with ISS on the morning of March 16th.

The 2023 launch race:

17 SpaceX
9 China
4 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India

American private enterprise now leads China 18 to 9 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 18 to 15. SpaceX alone leads entire world, including the rest of the U.S., 17 to 16.

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March 14, 2023 Quick space links

3:54 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

 

 

 

 

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A Martian crater, ice, and dust devil tracks

3:20 pm

A Martian crater, ice, and dust devil tracks
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on January 2, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is once again a terrain sample image, taken not for any specific research but to fill a gap in the schedule so as to maintain the camera’s proper temperature.

What this picture shows is that even though Mars has a thin atmosphere that produces dust devils, the propagation of dust devils is not uniform across the red planet’s surface. In this picture there are a lot of devil tracks, going in many different directions. Yet few of the many cool images I post from MRO show this number of tracks. In many cases the ground might not be agreeable to leaving tracks, but that cannot be the entire explanation.
» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Eventbrite routinely blacklists conservative events

1:52 pm

Eventbrite: hostile to freedom

They’re coming for you next: Eventbrite, an online “self-service ticketing platform”, has been routinely blacklisting conservative events, often cancelling already existing events or telling customers the event no longer exists, always for vague and often contradictory reasons.

What Eventbrite did to one Matt Walsh event is typical:

In late February, the website removed from its page for a [March 1st] Matt Walsh event on transgenderism sponsored by Young America’s Foundation at Stanford University. Organizers were forced to set up an alternative event page just before Walsh’s appearance. Not only did Eventbrite remove the page, “[h]undreds of registered attendees were surprised to receive emails from the company informing them that their tickets had been canceled,” YAF wrote in a Feb. 27 news release.

Though students at Stanford set fire to promotional flyers put up by YAF prior to the event, the event itself went off without incident.

The article at the first link above lists numerous other times Eventbrite cancelled conservative events without explanation, including several other Walsh university events, a screening of Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules that documents fraud and election tampering in the 2020 election, a event in support of the U.S. military, and a Memorial Day event honoring veterans.

All of this blacklisting contradicts Eventbrite’s own mission statement:
» Read more

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Potential Artemis-3 landing site on the Moon

10:54 am

The landing zone for the Artemis-3 mission to the Moon

Overview map

The panorama above was released today by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) science team, and shows one of the candidate landing sites (arrow) where Starship could land as part of the Artemis-3 mission to the Moon.

The map of the south pole to the right, created from LRO images and annotated by me, gives the context. The yellow lines indicate the approximate area covered by the panorama. The terrain here is rugged, to put it mildly. As the science team notes,

Imagine the view from the summit; it rises more than 5000 meters (16,400 feet) above its base. Off in the distance, you could see a 3500 meter (11,480 feet) tall cliff. One could argue that the sheer grandeur of this region makes it a prime candidate. But then again, a landing here might be too exciting?

That 11,480-foot-high cliff is the crater wall to the right of the arrow. Make sure you go to the link to view the original image. This will be a spectacular place to visit. Whether the astronauts however will be able to find out anything about ice in the shadowed crater floor thousands of feet below them remains questionable.

Artemis-3 is presently scheduled for 2025 but no one should be surprised if it is delayed.

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LeoLabs to establish radar facility in Argentina

9:41 am

LeoLabs, a private commercial company aiming to provide orbital tracking of all space objects as small as two centimeters, has announced plans to establish its seventh global radar facility in Argentina.

The S-band radar, scheduled to be completed by the end of the year, will be located on the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego. “The Southern Hemisphere has not been well covered for space safety and space domain awareness,” LeoLabs CEO Dan Ceperley told SpaceNews. “There are a lot of conjunctions close to the North Pole and the South Pole. This radar will make a very meaningful improvement in the tracking of those conjunctions.”

Currently, LeoLabs tracks objects in low-Earth orbit with phased array radars in Alaska, Australia, Portugal’s Azores archipelago, New Zealand, Texas and Costa Rica.

The company essentially competes with the Space Force in tracking object in orbit, and has raised more than $100 million in private investment capital to build its ground stations.

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Space startups get their SVB assets back when Feds move in

9:34 am

Because of the decision of the federal government to guarantee all deposits at the failed Silcon Valley Bank (SVB), even those above the $250K limit set by the FDIC law, several space rocket startups are no longer threatened with failure, for now.

Astra for example is now seeking to move as quickly as it can its assets, equaling about 15% of the company, to other financial institutions.

I would expect this incident will cause every company to make sure their assets are distributed more widely, as a hedge against the failure of one bank.

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Splats on Mars!

5:03 pm

Splats on Mars
Click for original image.

Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped and sharpened to post here, was taken on February 3, 2023 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a number of crater splats of varying sizes. If you look at the full image, you will find several even bigger splats to the north of the one in the picture to the right. You will also see many more similar-sized crater splats to the south.

I cannot provide any confident explanation about what caused these splats, other than to assume that most here are secondary impacts from ejecta thrown out by a larger impact somewhere nearby. I also assume all these small impacts occurred at the same time because they all appear to have hit the ground when it had the same thick liquid consistency, a condition that was probably temporary. Note for example how many of the other craters in the full image do not have this same splattered look.
» Read more

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March 13, 2023 Quick space links

3:48 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

 

4 comments

The sad state of free speech in America illustrated by three top universities

1:03 pm

Cancelling the Bill of Rights

Events in the last two weeks at three of America’s top universities, Stanford, Cornell, and Yale, have illustrated starkly how many young Americans and their teachers now either support censorship and violence against dissenters, or are too cowardly to defend the rights of Americans when their free speech rights are attacked.

At the Stanford Law School a 5th Circuit Judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, was shouted down and then lectured by a dean at the school for daring to have opinions she disagreed with. Stanford officials have issued a weak apology, but have done nothing concrete to discipline anyone for enforcing a heckler’s veto at the school.

At Cornell, the promise of university officials to punish students who participated in a protest that shouted down Ann Coulter has apparently been put aside once the heat died down.

Cornell University’s media team has not responded to multiple inquiries in the past months on possible punishments for the student activists. The College Fix also emailed communications director Rebecca Valli on March 6 and asked for an update on investigations into the students involved and what Cornell planned to do in the future to prevent similar problems.

The silence comes despite an initial strong statement from university leadership that criticized the Nov. 9 disruption.

Finally, officials at Yale Law School have attempted to fix things after being badly embarrassed by a similar violent protest in March 2022, when students shouted down Kristen Waggoner, the president of the non-profit law firm the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). » Read more

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