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An evening pause: The players are Henri Sigfridsson, Rachel Bullen and Etienne Boudreault. The music is late 20th century classical. Though this can sometimes be grating, this piece is quite comparable in sound and melody to a lot of great 20th century art rock. And the instruments are unusual, the playing is grand, and it definitely gives us some variety.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
The modern dark age: Despite Cornell University’s refusal to agree to their demands and cancel the lecture, a mob of students prevented her from speaking last night, forcing her in the end to cancel her lecture because she could not get a word out without being interrupted.
What appears to have happened, the Review added, is that protesters “seemed to be employing a chain tactic, beginning just as soon as the last heckler was removed, so as to continuously speak over Coulter.”
As The College Fix previously reported, Cornell University had denied a student petition to disinvite Coulter.
And at the beginning of Coulter’s talk Wednesday evening, the dean of students warned the audience that disruptors would be removed and referred to the Office of Student Conduct, the Review reported.
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.
"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
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
A very interesting and informative article on the state of the insurance business for rockets and satellites
Here, here, and here. The first was taken from the Tianzhou-4 cargo ship after it undocked. The second is a nice short movie. The third’s ground-based telescope was a bit unsteady, to put it mildly.
This might be throwing good money after bad, but then, that is what the government does routinely.
Click for full image.
Today’s cool image is a variation of yesterday’s, showing another area on the edge of Mars’ largest volcanic ash field, dubbed the Medusae Fossae Formation and about the size of India. This time however the edge is an abrupt cliff, not the slow petering out of wind-shaped mesas.
The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 27, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what I very roughly estimate to be a 1,500 to 2,500 foot high cliff that appears to delineate the edge. To the north we have a plateau of intersperse layers of flood lava and ash. To the south those layers have eroded away, leaving a rough lava plain with a handful of scattered wind-sculpted mesas.
The overview map below, by providing a wider view of his region, makes its nature clearer.
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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.
“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.
On the same day it won a contract to build a control center for Globalstar’s satellite constellation, Rocket Lab also set December 7, 2022 as the target date for its first Electron launch from Wallops Island in Virginia.
The company had originally hoped to launch from Wallops two years ago, but delays caused by NASA’s bureaucracy in approving the flight termination software made that impossible.
With two operating launchpads, one in New Zealand and one in the U.S., Rocket Lab should now be able to ramp up its launch pace, assuming it has the customers. So far this year the company has done about one launch per month.
ULA’s Atlas-5 rocket early this morning successfully launched a NOAA weather satellite, completing this soon-to-be-retired rocket’s last launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
The company also successfully tested an inflatable heat shield it wants to use to safely recover and reuse the first stage engines on its new Vulcan rocket.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
51 SpaceX
48 China
19 Russia
9 Rocket Lab
8 ULA
American private enterprise now leads China 74 to 48 in the national rankings, but trails the rest of the world combined 76 to 74.
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.
"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
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
To listen to all of John Batchelor’s podcasts, go here.
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An evening pause: Performed live in 2019, when he was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay, who also clued me into the two previous posts, which I decided to give more attention to. Thanks Jay!
This sounding rocket is apparently based on the 2nd stage of an orbital version the company is building.
I am not sure if Thales installs the solar panels. If so, I suspect they will want to wait before shipment in order get a report on why one panel did not deploy on the Cygnus now in orbit. It is also possible that Northrop Grumman installs the panels, and will handle any revisions after delivery.
Apparently, the delays in the UK are seriously hurting the company. Because they only have one 747 carrier plane, Cosmic Girl, they can only do one launch at a time, which means later launches — and the revenue they produce — are pushed back. The company thus desperately needs a second 747 so the delays on one launch don’t impact others.
China has abandoned its original plans to build its Long March 9 heavy lift rocket — intended to be comparable to NASA’s SLS — as an expendable rocket with side boosters and instead design it with a reusable first stage.
A new model of a Long March 9 rocket featuring grid fins and no side boosters recently went on display at the ongoing Zhuhai Airshow in southern China, prompting speculation that the long-standing plan of an expendable rocket had been dropped.
Liu Bing, director of the general design department at the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT), later confirmed the new direction in an interview with China Central Television Nov. 7. The new, current plan for the rocket will be a three-stage, 108-meter-high, 10-meter-diameter and 4,180 metric ton rocket capable of delivering 150 tons to low Earth orbit (LEO), 50 tons to lunar transfer orbit (LTO), or 35 tons to Mars transfer orbit. The rocket is scheduled to be ready for test flight around 2030.
The design however has not been finalized.
It appears that China has been watching NASA’s attempts to launch SLS, and decided copying that rocket is likely a mistake. So instead, they have decided to copy Falcon 9 instead, though make Long March 9 a much bigger rocket.
All of this however is really nothing more than engineering by PowerPoint. Nothing so far really exists, and any plans for a rocket whose first test launch is eight years away are plans that no one should take very seriously.
Rocket Lab has finalized a 10-year lease for using one of the engine test facilities at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi for developing the Archimedes rocket engine for its new Neutron rocket.
With the new agreement, the A-3 Test Stand and about 24 surrounding acres at Stennis will be incorporated into the Archimedes Test Complex. Archimedes is Rocket Lab’s new liquid oxygen and liquid methane rocket engine that will power its large, reusable Neutron rocket.
Rocket Lab will have exclusive access to use and develop the A-3 Test Stand area, including associated propellant barge docks and buildings. The initial 10-year agreement includes an option to extend an additional 10 years.
The Mississippi Development Authority is providing assistance for Rocket Lab to develop the new site and to relocate and install needed equipment.
With this agreement Rocket Lab is clearly moving forward aggressively in its project to build a new rocket that can complete head-to-head with SpaceX’s Falcon 9.
When it comes to the COVID lie, we are all being forced
to enter that door.
This update will be a relatively short one, but it will once again demonstrate, with data, that the claims by politicians and government health officials that COVID required draconian restrictions on the lives of Americans were utterly wrong, and they were so wrong it proved those politicians or officials were either filled with malice or were completely incompetent.
This report by the way merely supplements earlier reports, of which just a few can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. And these are only my reports since July. If you search Behind the Black going back to 2020 you will find many more stories backing up this new evidence.
All in all, the panic over COVID has simply provided more damning evidence that the so-called elites who run our society are generally bankrupt, have incredibly poor judgment, and should be fired as soon as possible.
» Read more
Even as we wait for the final results in numerous elections yesterday, I thought I would throw the chart to the right out for my readers to digest.
The chart was created by climate scientist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, who has also been one of the principal investigators for one of NASA climate satellites.
As seen in the accompanying plot, 50-year (1973-2022) summer (June/July/August) temperature trends for the contiguous 48 U.S. states from 36 CMIP-6 climate model experiments average nearly twice the warming rate as observed by the NOAA climate division dataset.
…The official NOAA observations produce a 50-year summer temperature trend of +0.26 C/decade for the U.S., while the model trends range from +0.28 to +0.71 C/decade.
Not one climate model predicted the actual global temperature for the past half century. All predicted too much warming, with about half the models predicting twice as much warming as actually occurred.
In other words, the models continue to express opinion, not science. To rely on any model for establishing climate policy is not only foolish, it is downright irresponsible.
But don’t worry. Joe Biden and the Democrats are on their game, and will shut down all fossil fuel energy sources, because it simply feels right to them.
Meanwhile, on a related side note, the fact that it is no longer possible to finish counting the votes on election day — something that Americans did routinely for more than two centuries long before computers — either is another sign that serious election tampering is going on, or is a clear demonstration that we have entered the new dark age, where it will no longer be possible to accomplish some of the most basic tasks of a true civilization.
In either case, the barbarians rule, and we all suffer because of it.
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 13, 2022 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It is another fine example of the wind-blown sculpted terrain that one finds routinely in Mars’ largest volcanic ash field, dubbed the Medusae Fossae Formation. About the size of India, this gigantic field is thought to be the source of most of the dust on Mars.
This particular location sits on the northernmost edge of that huge field. The elongated mesas mark the field’s edge, disappearing to the north but becoming thick and extensive to the south. The prevailing southeast-to-northwest winds have acted to clean most of the ash away.
We can get an idea about how deep and pervasive that field once was at this location by the pedestal crater in the middle right. Once, the floor of that crater was below the top of the ash field. At that time, the top of the dunes marked the general ground level across this entire image. Over time, the winds blew most of this material away, but the denser packed floor of the crater resisted that erosion, and thus now stands above the surrounding terrain.
The more normal-looking craters nearby could have occurred before the ash was deposited, or after it was blown away. The impact that created the pedestal crater however occurred when the ash covered everything here.
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India’s space agency ISRO is now preparing for the first drop test of its own home-built version of an X-37B mini-shuttle, designed to remain in orbit for a period of time, return to Earth on a runway, and then be reused.
According to ISRO officials, the RLV [Reusable Launch Vehicle] wing body will be carried using a helicopter to an altitude of three to five km and released at a distance of about four to five km ahead of the runway with a horizontal velocity. After the release, the RLV will glide, navigate towards the runway and land autonomously with a landing gear in the defence airfield near Chitradurga.
A prototype of the RLV was flown on a suborbital test flight in 2016, landing in the ocean. The pending test would be the first to attempt a runway landing, essential if the spacecraft is to safely return to Earth and then be reused.
The Arizona court of appeals last month ruled that a land deal between Pima County and the high altitude balloon company World View was unconstitutional, and could not go forward.
Per the agreement, the county would fund the construction of facilities, including a 135,000-square-foot manufacturing facility, with office spaces and a launch pad, on property it already owned. World View would then lease the property from the county for 20 years. In return, the company would hire more than 400 employees, with an average salary of over $55,000, and spend $32.3 million on equipment.
Twenty years of lease payments were expected to total around $14 million, estimated to be the property’s value at that time. World View would then have the option to buy the facility for $10.
Six years ago the Goldwater Institute sued, saying this deal was illegal according to the state’s constitution. Last month the court agreed, killing the deal.
Since World View remains in operation in these facilities, Pima County will have to renegotiate at market rates. How that will effect the company itself, which now hopes to begin flying near-space tourist flights by 2024, charging $50K per person, remains unknown.
According to India’s space agency ISRO, it recently provided the facilities for the Indian rocket startup company Agnikul Cosmos to complete a static fire engine test of its second-stage rocket engine.
The agency fired Agnikul’s fully 3D-printed second-stage rocket engine Agnilet for a duration of 15 seconds. Agnilet is a regeneratively cooled 1.4 kN semi-cryogenic engine that uses Liquid oxygen and Aviation Turbine Fuel (ATF) as propellants. According to Agnikul, the engine is capable of generating 3kN of thrust at sea level and would propel the upper stage of Agnibaan, the company’s under-development launch vehicle.
The company had said it hoped to complete its first launch this year, but that appears highly unlikely. Nonetheless, it has raised at least $14.1 million in investment capital.
Thus, it appears India now has two private rocket companies gearing up for launch in ’23, Agnikul Cosmos and Skyroot.
Astra, having abandoned its Rocket-3.3 in order to develop its larger Rocket-4 smallsat launcher, announced yesterday that is laying off 16% of its workforce as part of this change in direction.
The decision to abandon Rocket-3.3 has at this time removed the company as an operational rocket company, and has thus put it behind several other competitors which are now gearing up for launch. Its third quarter report also showed a $41 million loss this year, 26% larger than the same quarter last year.
As a result, the company’s stock value has declined 94%, and is now selling for 58 cents per share. If that price does not rise above $1 before April of next year, NASDAQ has said it would delist it.
The German rocket startup Rocket Factory Augsburg this week unveiled the second stage of its planned rocket, with its Helix engine attached.
This second stage will be used for engine tests in Sweden.
“The campaign will feature three main tests: The first test will last a few seconds, followed by one for around 10 seconds, then the full flight duration. Every engine is acceptance tested. Then each engine is fired a second time during stage acceptance and then started a third time for flight. We have already proven that we can fire the same engine 3x without switching out components with our long-duration hot-fire campaign. Now we want to repeat that achievement with a full upper stage.”
The company hopes to use this stage in the first orbital test flight of its RFA-1 rocket, targeting a launch late next year. That rocket will use nine more Helix engines in its first stage, and will thus be able to put into orbit slightly more mass than Firefly’s Alpha rocket or payload.
Chinese engineers have undocked the Tianzhou-4 unmanned freighter from their Tiangong-3 space station, even as other engineers complete the stacking of Tianzhou-5 on its rocket and move it to its launch site.
Tianzhou-4 remains in orbit. At some point it will be de-orbited to burn up over the ocean, but China’s state-run press has not said when. In the past engineers have kept these cargo freighters in orbit after undocking for long periods in order to test their capabilities.
Though the launch date for Tianzhou-5 on its Long March 7 rocket was also not revealed by today’s press report, earlier reports suggest the launch is targeting November 12th.
We’re here to help you: The first launch of a satellite from the United Kingdom, launched by Virgin Orbit by taking off from a runway in Cornwall, is experiencing prolonged delays getting its license approved by the British bureaucracy.
While the company says there are no specific issues holding up approval, the permit remains unapproved. Virgin Orbit had hoped initially to launch in the summer, but could not, and this delay has also delayed its later launches and thus reduced its profits in 2022, forcing it to obtain extra investment capital from Richard Branson’s Virgin Group in order to pay the bills.
Meanwhile, the British bureaucracy struggles to issue the licenses.
The delays have attracted the attention of a House of Commons committee, which released a report Nov. 4 criticizing those delays and calling for more personnel to be assigned to reviewing license applications. “For this initial set of licence applications, the Department for Transport must provide additional resource to the CAA [Civil Aviation Authority] to ensure that the licensing process does not impede the feasibility of a launch this year,” the report stated.
A source familiar with the CAA’s licensing activities, speaking on background, noted that the CAA now had about 50 people working on license applications, up from the 35 mentioned in the report. That included one person seconded to the CAA from the U.S. Federation Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation.
As always, private enterprise gets it done, while government requires dozens of people and months to simply fill out forms. Worse, we all know the CAA is going to say yes. The delay is simply a game to justify its existence, not to really accomplish anything.
Despite on of its two solar panels only partly deployed, astronaut Nicole Mann was able to use the robot arm on ISS to grab Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus freighter and bring it into its port, where ground engineers successfully berthed it.
The image to the right is a screen capture from NASA TV as Cygnus approached. You can see the problematic panel at the bottom. Though it has folded out from its initial stored position, it has not opened up fully.
The freighter will stay docked to ISS until late January, during which the crew will unload about four tons of cargo and then fill it with garbage before sending it to burn up over the ocean. We should expect NASA and Northrop Grumman to also plan a spacewalk to not only inspect the panel to figure out what failed, but to see if it can still be deployed.
Though one of its two solar panels remains undeployed, engineers and Northrop Grumman and NASA have proceeded with four engine burns so as to rendezvous with ISS tomorrow, November 9th, with arrival in the early morning hours.
Expedition 68 NASA astronaut Nicole Mann will capture Cygnus with the station’s robotic arm, with NASA astronaut Josh Cassada acting as backup. After Cygnus capture, ground commands will be sent from mission control at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for the station’s arm to rotate and install it on the station’s Unity module Earth-facing port.
According to this NASA update, it appears that NASA managers are confident that the stuck solar panel is not blocking the grapple point, preventing the arm from grabbing the capsule. At the same time, the wording in the update is just a bit vague, and also suggests that before this capture occurs they will be inspecting Cygnus very carefully.
I will be doing a long appearance on the Space Show tonight with David Livingston, beginning at 7 pm (Pacific). Please feel free to call in and ask questions.
In order to give them time to make sure all is right after the coming tropical storm, NASA managers have decided to delay the first test flight of SLS two days until November 16.
A launch during a two-hour window that opens at 1:04 a.m. EST on Nov. 16 would result in a splashdown on Friday, Dec. 11. If needed, NASA has a back-up launch opportunity on Saturday, Nov. 19, and will coordinate with the U.S. Space Force for additional launch opportunities.
At the moment they have decided to keep the rocket on the launchpad, as they expect it will be able to withstand the predicted storm. If the predictions change however they still have the option to roll it back into the assembly building.
What the Democrats want to repeal.
I think today’s blacklist story about a lawsuit by five California doctors against a state law that was passed by the Democrat-controlled state legislature and signed by Democrat governor Gavin Newsom, is a perfect blacklist story for today, election day.
Two years ago, at the beginning of the Biden administration, I noticed an immediate change in the behavior of Democratic Party politicians and their supporters. No longer were they whispering about their desire to silence their opponents. Suddenly they were open and aggressive about it, calling for blacklists and commissions, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) enthused, “…to figure out how we rein in our media environment so you can’t just spew disinformation and misinformation.” Here is what I suggested they do:
Hey, Alexandria, I’ve got the perfect name for your congressional commission. Why not call it the House Un-American Activities Committee? You could subpoena right-wing writers and journalists to testify against their will in Congress, demanding to know their party affiliations. You could also set up lists of these proven conservatives so that businesses nationwide can blacklist them and keep them from working.
As it turned out, the Democrats did exactly this, though their commission was instead named the January 6th commission, supposedly focused on punishing anyone involved in the entirely legal demonstrations that occurred in DC that day. At no time in the past two years has that commission, or Biden’s Department of Justice, showed the slightest interest in investigating actual political violence. No, instead, the goal has been to persecute ordinary people and slander entirely innocent politicians.
Nor has the Democratic Party’s campaign against free speech and personal liberty been limited to this commission. I started my blacklist column at that time because the number of examples of blacklisting, censorship, and abuse of power by the left, both in and out of that party and among its supporters, had become so numerous I realized if I reported every case as it happened, my website would be swamped. Instead, I decided to cover one per day, to make it clear how much these thugs were normalizing this goonlike behavior. After two years, that column now lists more than four hundred examples of blacklists and abuse of power, almost all of which were done by the Democratic Party or its supporters on the left.
The law under dispute in California is a perfect example. Passed in September, 2022, it forbids any doctor from saying anything the government doesn’t like, or face the loss of their medical license for “unprofessional conduct.” Below is the bill’s specific but very vague wording, designed to allow the government to punish almost all medical professionals for anything they might say or publish, merely because someone in the government disagrees with it:
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With the launch of Ispace’s first lunar lander, Hakuto-R, only two weeks away, the private company has obtained a license from the Japanese government to conduct private transactions on the Moon.
The license allows Ispace to complete a contract awarded by NASA in December 2020, to acquire regolith from the lunar surface to sell to the space agency. During M1, Ispace is expected to collect regolith that accumulates on the footpad of the landing gear during the touchdown on the surface, photograph the collected regolith and conduct an “in-place” transfer of ownership of the lunar regolith to NASA. After ownership transfer, the collected material becomes the property of NASA, under the Artemis program. Under the contract, the lunar regolith will not be returned to Earth.
Under a second contract awarded to Ispace’s subsidiary [Ispace EU] … Ispace EU will acquire the lunar material on its second mission scheduled for 2024 as part of the HAKUTO-R program. An application for Mission 2 will be submitted to obtain a separate authorization.
This mission will also land the UAE’s first lunar rover, Rashid.
According to the Outer Space Treaty, it is the responsibility of each nation to regulate the private operations of its citizens in space. This action thus follows the laws that Japan has passed to supervise commercial space companies.
Two stories today suggest that Richard Branson’s space empire continues to totter.
First, a judge ruled that the fraud lawsuit against Branson by other stockholders in the suborbital tourist company Virgin Galactic can go forward.
The suit claims Branson concealed safety problems while he sold off the bulk of his own stock at top dollar. Only after he had dumped his stock were those problems revealed, and the stock price plummeted, now trading at less than 10% of the peak in February 2021, when Branson sold.
Second, it appears that though Branson’s satellite orbital company Virgin Orbit is operational, it is not going to launch as many satellites this year as expected, and thus required an investment of $25 million on November 4th from Branson’s Virgin Group to stay liquid.
Branson clearly wanted to be a major player in space. In the end, he has mostly failed, though once again Virgin Orbit remains a viable launching company for smallsats.
Delayed two years because of engine cracks, Japan’s space agency JAXA yesterday successfully completed a static fire test of its new H3 rocket.
JAXA aims to conduct the first launch of an H3 rocket before the end of this fiscal year. The space agency will spend about two weeks analyzing data from the latest test to determine whether it was successful.
Two first-stage engines were fired for about 25 seconds during the test, causing smoke to billow from the base of the rocket towards the sea.
Assuming no new issues are found in the test data, Japan hopes to complete the first H3 launch in 2023.
