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Another technical problem identified in Virgin Galactic spaceship

8:37 am

Capitalism in space: Virgin Galactic announced late Friday, when few would notice it, that a new technical problem has been identified with its Virgin Galactic spaceship.

In a statement issued late Sept. 10, Virgin Galactic said a third-party supplier, which it did not identify, notified the company of a potential manufacturing defect in a flight control actuation system component. Virgin said it is conducting inspections with the vendor to determine if the suspect component needs to be repaired or replaced.

Because of the inspections, Virgin Galactic said the earliest it would perform the next SpaceShipTwo mission, called Unity 23, is the middle of October. The company had previously stated the mission would take place in late September or early October.

This issue is completely independent from the flight path anomaly that occurred during the July suborbital flight that has caused the FAA to ground Virgin Galactic.

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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

Data from Opportunity suggests surface dew periodically appears even in the dry equatorial regions

4:43 pm

Using data from the rover Opportunity, scientists now think that the renewal of Martian salt crusts on rock surfaces on the rim of Endeavour Crater could possibly by caused by the appearance of rare thin wetting events, and that such events could have even occurred very recently and be on-going..

The scientists looked at the rate of erosion and renewal of the salt crusts, and found them to be in a steady state. The erosion is slow, taking from 200,000 to 2,000,000 years to remove 1 to 2 millimeters. However, periodically a thin film of water or wetting occurs, not unlike dew on Earth, which quickly acts to renew the crust. As David Mittlefehldt of the Astromaterials Research Office at the Johnson Space Center and the lead author of the paper explained to me,

Taken together, the data leaves open the possibility the salt mobilization has occurred within the last few thousand years. It could be ongoing in the sense that over a period of thousands? or hundreds? of years it might happen again.

In other words, the evidence suggests that every few hundred or thousand years the surface of these rocks gets wet, which results in the placement of a new thin layer of salt crusts.

Mittlefehldt also emphasized to me that these wetting events are rare, and “there is also the case that such an event may never come again because of changing conditions.”

The situation is essentially like on Earth, where in some places hydrologists measure the size of floods by how rare they are. A 1,000 year flood is big, but it happens very rarely. At Endeavour Crater these wetting events are comparably rare, but they do not involve big floods, but a mere moistening of the ground.

The location of Endeavour Crater is about 2 degrees south latitude, so it sits in the dry equatorial regions where no surface or near surface ice has so far been found. However, the cyclic nature of Mars’ orbit and obliquity could have changed this in the past, and could change this again in the future. At this time we simply don’t have enough information to know.

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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.

Door-to-door canvas of voters in Arizona finds extensive evidence of vote tampering

1:45 pm

A door-to-door canvas of voters in Maricopa County in Arizona, conducted by an organization independent of the audit being done by the state legislature, found extensive evidence of vote tampering in the count of mail-in ballots..

An estimated 173,104 “missing or lost” votes were reported by canvassers who went door-to-door verifying registration and voting information for thousands of residents.

According to the report: “These are American citizens living in Maricopa County who cast a vote, primarily by mail, in the election and yet there is no record of their vote with the county and it was not counted in the reported vote totals for the election. Additionally an estimated 96,389 mail-in votes were cast under the names of registered voters who were either unknown to the residents of the registration address or who were verified as having moved away prior to October 2020.”

A large percentage of in person voters also had “mail-in” ballots counted in the election, the canvas found.

The canvas visited about 12,000 voters in Maricopa county, so the estimates above are extrapolations of the data actually obtained. You can read the actual report here [pdf] .

In going door-to-door, however, the canvas appears to have compared what was actually recorded by the board of elections with what the voters themselves now claim. While it is possible that when asked months later how they voted voters could misremember whether they voted by mail, in person, or even at all, it is unlikely that so many would get it wrong. The numbers thus strongly suggest that something fishy was going on in the county election board in tabulating these mail-in ballots, either because of incompetence or downright dishonesty.

That the county’s board of elections has stonewalled all investigations adds considerable weight to this conclusion.

The report’s main conclusion however is the most important. We should ban mail-in voting, as it puts one’s vote in the hands of additional third parties, at the post office and at the election boad, any one of whom can take actions to negate or change your vote.

Vote in person. Throw away that mail-in ballot. Stop making it easy for crooks to cheat.

33 comments

On the edge of Mars’ glacier country

1:25 pm

Color dry mesas on Mars
Click for full image.

Today’s cool image sits right on the southern edge of Mars’ northern glacier country, at 29 degrees north latitude. The picture to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken of this location on June 4, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows what appears to be the exposed and scraped bedrock and mesas on the floor of an unnamed 60-mile-wide crater.

That scraped bedrock is quite beautiful, reminiscent of the bare carved mesas and bedrock one sees throughout the southwest of the United States. To hike from that central valley to the top of the bright mesa would be a fine experience, especially because of the suggested change in colors in the color strip.

The overview map below gives more context.
» Read more

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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

Sunspot update: Activity declines in August to just above prediction

12:02 pm

On September 1st NOAA released its update of its monthly sunspot cycle graph, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity for the past month. That graph is below, annotated to show the previous solar cycle predictions and thus provide context.

In August sunspot activity dropped from July so that it was only slightly above the prediction of NOAA’s panel of solar scientists, as indicated by the red curve. The blank streak at the very end of July ended on August 2nd (a streak of seven days and the longest in years), but was followed during the month by an additional five blank days.

» Read more

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Today’s blacklisted American: Two flight attendants fired by Alaska Airlines for asking questions

11:28 am

The Civil Rights Act of 1964: not applicable to Alaska Airlines
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: Apparently Alaska Airlines thinks
it doesn’t apply to them.

Lacey Smith, a former flight attendant for Alaska Airlines, found herself fired from her job when she did exactly what Alaska Airlines had requested, joining the company’s online discussion group debating its decision to publicly support a leftist bill in Congress that religious people have concerns about.

What horrible thing did Lacey Smith do in that discussion group? She simply asked a question.

Alaska Airlines issued a statement on the employees’ message board declaring support for the “Equality” Act—the deceptively named legislation that’s currently stalling in the Senate. As First Liberty [the legal firm defending Lacey] has explained, this bill poses a serious threat to religious freedom if it becomes law.

As a Christian, Lacey has concerns about the ramifications of the “Equality” Act—as do millions of Americans.

So, when Alaska Airlines invited employees to comment and ask questions about the company’s support for the “Equality” Act, Lacey took the opportunity to respond on the company message board.

She asked, “As a company, do you think it’s possible to regulate morality?”

This was all she did, ask this one simple question, doing exactly what the company requested. The result? According to the video at the link,
» Read more

4 comments

Facebook and Ray-Ban selling sunglasses able to take pictures also

9:54 am

Your privacy belongs to us! Facebook and Ray-Ban have teamed up to create sunglasses that the wearer can use to discreetly to take pictures of their surroundings.

The Ray-Ban Stories eyewear features two 5-MP front-facing cameras for 2,592 x 1,944-pixel photos or 1,184 x 1,184-pixel videos at 30 frames per second.

A capture button is pushed to snap photo memories of what you see on your stroll through the city on a hot and sunny day, or record 30-second video clips to post online to such platforms as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and TikTok via a new Facebook View app for iOS and Android. The app also allows content to be edited or enhanced before upload, and saved to the phone’s memory, though the smart glasses do have enough built-in storage for more than 500 photos or 30 video clips. Or users can opt to for hands-free operation via Facebook Assistant voice commands.

The article describes several features that supposedly address the questions of privacy, such as led lights that glow when a picture is taken, but in the end these glasses are essentially a voyeur’s dream.

Without question such products have their legitimate uses, such as by undercover journalists or criminal investigators. To market them to the general public however means that both Facebook and Ray-Ban are willing to ignore concerns of right and wrong and the likelihood that their product will be badly misused for entire immoral reasons. All they care about is profit.

Or maybe the two companies are really developing this product to sell a more secretive version to their allies in the government. One does wonder.

8 comments

Radio outbursts near center of Milky Way baffle astronomers

9:42 am

Astronomers have discovered a repeating radio outbursts near center of Milky Way that does not match any previously known phenomenon.

According to a new paper accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and posted on the preprint server arXiv, the energy source is extremely finicky, appearing bright in the radio spectrum for weeks at a time and then completely vanishing within a day. This behavior doesn’t quite fit the profile of any known type of celestial body, the researchers wrote in their study, and thus may represent “a new class of objects being discovered through radio imaging.”

The radio source — known as ASKAP J173608.2−321635 — was detected with the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope, situated in the remote Australian outback. In an ASKAP survey taken between April 2019 and August 2020, the strange signal appeared 13 times, never lasting in the sky for more than a few weeks, the researchers wrote. This radio source is highly variable, appearing and disappearing with no predictable schedule, and doesn’t seem to appear in any other radio telescope data prior to the ASKAP survey.

The object is even more unique in that it apparently has not been emitting any energy in any other wavelengths, including optical, infrared, or X-rays, something that such repeating outbursts usually do. So far about four such objects have been seen near the galactic center, though this new object’s behavior is not quite the same as the other three.

This is not a signal from alien life. Its energy and nature clearly makes it some form of astronomical object, though what that object is remains unknown. That such objects have so far only been detected near the center of the galaxy, where the environment is especially strange because of the presence of the supermassive black hole dubbed Sagittarius A* (pronounced A-star), suggests we really do not understand the astronomical possibilities in such regions.

8 comments

Questions raised about Branson’s most recent Virgin Galactic stock sale

9:31 am

It appears that both Virgin Galactic and Richard Branson might have violated SEC regulations when they sold more than $800 million in stock this summer without notifying buyers of the FAA investigation into the anomaly on Branson’s July 11th suborbital flight that has now grounded all SpaceShipTwo flights.

On July 12, Virgin Galactic announced in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it was selling $500 million worth of common stock. The filing did not mention that during its edge-of-space flight the day before, its aircraft deviated from its air-traffic-control clearance, a mishap that would ultimately trigger a Federal Aviation Administration investigation and lead to the indefinite grounding of its space-tourism operation.

The FAA began investigating on July 23, a spokesperson told Insider. On August 11, the agency grounded Virgin Galactic’s rocket plane.

In an August 13 SEC filing, Richard Branson, the English billionaire who founded Virgin Galactic in 2004, said that in the previous three days, he had sold roughly 10.5 million personal shares, a stake worth about $300 million.

Let’s review the timeline.

July 11: The flight occurs, with high winds forcing it outside its planned flight path.
July 12: Virgin Galactic sells $500 million in stock, without mentioning the anomaly.
July 16: By this date the company was required to inform the FAA of any anomalies during the flight.
July 23: The FAA initiates its investigation..
August 11: The FAA grounds Virgin Galactic.
August 13: SEC filing reveals Branson had sold $300 million in stock without mentioning the anomaly.
September 1: New Yorker article reveals investigation of anomaly.

Though no investigation had been started, Virgin Galactic must have known about the flight anomaly when it sold its $500 million in shares on July 12, right after the flight.. By August, when Branson sold his $300 million in shares, that investigation was on-going. Yet he also failed to mention the anomaly.

As I have said before, Branson has all the markings of a conman. He has very carefully been selling stock, reducing his share in the company in the past two years from 51% to 18%, with each stock sale carefully timed to take advantage of some event that pumped up the stock’s price.

All in all, the pattern by Branson suggests he really does not have much faith in Virgin Galactic’s future.

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Rocket Lab negatively impacted by New Zealand’s Wuhan panic lockdowns

9:07 am

Capitalism in space? Rocket Lab reported this week that not only has its income been slashed because of New Zealand’s draconian lockdowns in fear of COVID-19, the company has had to cut its planned launches for the fourth quarter of 2021 by more than half.

“Operations have experienced disruptions due to some of the most restrictive COVID-19 measures globally, including current stay-at-home orders which prevent launch operations from taking place,” said Peter Beck, chief executive of Rocket Lab, of New Zealand’s current restrictions. “Indications are that the current lockdown restrictions may ease by the end of September with the delta cases dropping in New Zealand, but this, of course, is subject to change.”

Those restrictions have delayed plans by Rocket Lab to perform three dedicated Electron launches of BlackSky satellites that had been scheduled to begin in late August. It could also affect the launch of NASA’s CAPSTONE lunar cubesat, which had been scheduled for no earlier than late October on another Electron from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand.

Adam Spice, chief financial officer, said that the company has five Electron launches manifested for the fourth quarter of the year, but is assuming only two launches in its financial projections. While those five launches would produce more than $40 million in revenue, the company is forecasting only $17-20 million in revenue for the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, the company has not been able to launch from its new launchpad at Wallops Island in Virginia because NASA — after almost two years! — has apparently still not approved the company’s flight termination system, used to destroy a rocket that has gone out of control. NASA’s refusal to approve this system is very puzzling and very suspicious, especially because Rocket Lab has launched 21 times with it from New Zealand, and even used it several times to successfully destroy failing rockets.

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Smoke and fire alarms in Russian ISS module Zvezda

8:54 am

In the middle of the night prior to a successful spacewalk by two Russian astronauts to begin the outfitting of the new Nauka module on ISS, fire alarms sounded in the Zvezda module, and both astronauts smelled smoke.

The incident, which the Russian space agency Roscosmos said happened at 1:55 a.m. GMT (9:55 p.m. EDT Wednesday) ahead of a scheduled spacewalk, is the latest in a string of problems to spur safety concerns over conditions on the Russian segment. “A smoke detector was triggered in the Zvezda service module of the Russian segment of the International Space Station during automatic battery charging, and an alarm went off,” Roscosmos said in a statement.

French astronaut Thomas Pesquet said “the smell of burning plastic or electronic equipment” wafted to the US segment of the station, Russian state news agency RIA Novosti reported, citing a NASA broadcast.

The Russian crew turned on a filter and, after the air was cleaned up, the astronauts went back to sleep, Roscosmos said.

It appears that because all the systems on the Russia portion of ISS continued to function normally, the Russians did no investigation. Or if they did, they have not revealed what they found. Nor has NASA provided any information.

In their history the Russians have experienced a number of fires on their various space stations. Some burned out without consequence (as it appears this recent one did). Others required aggressive action to bring them under control, as occurred on Mir several times. This history has apparently made the Russians somewhat nonchalant about such things.

That the issue was in Zvezda, however, which has a serious structural stress fracture problem in its hull, should be cause for a greater concern. Is this burn event related to the stress fractures? If I was an astronaut on board ISS I would surely want to know.

7 comments

Launches by China and Russia

8:43 am

Both Russia and China successfully completed launches yesterday. Russia launched a military reconnaissance satellite using its Soyuz-2 rocket. China in turn launched a communications satellite using its Long March 3B rocket.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

31 China
21 SpaceX
14 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

The U.S. still leads China 32 to 31 in the national rankings.

One comment

List of lawyers for fighting mask and vaccine mandates

9:31 pm

A new website has been established listing all the law firms available for fighting the Biden administration’s new Nazi vaccine mandates. As stated at the site:

[M]ost people (i.e. the people who just do what they are told by their employer, the government, or the narrative) do not know the law, so they believe that vaccine and mask mandates can be enforced. However, this is not true. This is when you will have to push back and contact an attorney to get advice.

I hope this helps you because now is the time to stand up to this kind of injustice and draconian medical tyranny. [emphasis mine]

The site not only lists a number of national legal organizations for filing lawsuits, it lists law firms, by state, that have said they will take these cases. It also adds this:

If you are Part of a Law Firm that would like to be added to The List, please email us at contact@fightthemandates.info.

As the website states, now is the time to stand up and fight. No more nice guy. Challenge these thugs, led by Democrat Joe Biden, in every way possible. Do not submit. Do not agree. Make them sweat.

I have never worn a mask, and continue to refuse to. Though this has denied me healthcare (no eye surgeon who does cataract surgeries nor will any lung doctor see me), I will not bow to this idiocy. I am now finding that some doctors will back down if I push hard enough.

Make them back down. Make them aware that their mask policies and new vaccine requirements are evil and you will not comply. You might not win, but if you do not fight you will have lost before the battle has even begun.

16 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Unvaccinated Americans should be denied health care, according to television show host Jimmy Kimmel

12:36 pm

Coming to your town in America soon!
Rounding up the unclean unvaccinated: What Jimmy Kimmel wants.

Genocide is coming: According to television show host Jimmy Kimmel, people who have not gotten the Wuhan flu shots, whether by choice or medical necessity, should be denied access to health care in hospitals.

“It was not a fun Labor Day weekend COVID-wise,” Kimmel said in his post-holiday monologue. “Dr. Fauci said if hospitals get any more overcrowded they’re going to have to make some very tough choices about who gets an ICU bed.”

He added, “That choice doesn’t seem so tough to me. ‘Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.‘” [emphasis mine]

So much for the left’s endless mantra, “Healthcare is a right!” Kimmel is a typical leftist who deep inside is really “a totalitarian screaming to get out.” He now thinks it is okay to treat some humans as subhuman, because they happen to have made some decisions in life he disagrees with.
» Read more

15 comments

Roscosmos declares film crew fit for launch to ISS

11:56 am

Capitalism in space: Roscosmos last week announced that the actress and director who plan to fly to ISS in October to film scenes for a science fiction movie are fit to fly.

Director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild got the thumbs-up after a meeting of the Chief Medical Commission at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center near Moscow, Russia’s federal space agency Roscosmos announced last week.

Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, who is scheduled to launch toward the orbiting lab with Shipenko and Peresild aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 5, also got final medical clearance. So did the backups for the mission: cosmonaut Oleg Artemyev, director Alexey Dudin and actor Alena Mordovina.

The movie script itself, about an astronaut who gets a heart attack while on a spacewalk and then has to have surgery in space before returning to Earth, actually sounds quite good and — most refreshing — well grounded in reality. American space films tend to go in absurd directions, often because the filmmakers are ignorant and have no interest in learning anything about the subject they are writing about.

So far, the schedule of upcoming space tourist flights appears on track to happen, as announced:

  • September 15, 2021: SpaceX’s Dragon capsule flies four private citizens on a three day orbital flight
  • October 2021: The Russians will fly two passengers to ISS for 10 days to shoot a movie
  • December 2021: The Russians will fly billionaire Yusaku Maezawa and his assistant to ISS for 12 days
  • cDecember 2021: Space Adventures, using a Dragon capsule, will fly four in orbit for five days
  • January 2022: Axiom, using a Dragon capsule, will fly four tourists to ISS
  • 2022-2024: Three more Axiom tourist flights on Dragon to ISS
  • 2024: Axiom begins launching its own modules to ISS, starting construction of its own private space station
  • c2024: SpaceX’s Starship takes Yusaku Maezawa and several others on a journey around the Moon.
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The boom in commercial space continues

10:50 am

Starship on an early test flight
Modern rocketry soaring under freedom

Capitalism in space: In the last two days there have been so many stories about different space companies winning new contracts I think it is important to illustrate this in one essay, rather than in multiple posts. Below is the list:

The last two stories are possibly the most significant, because both show that the shift in space from government-built to privately-built, as I advocated in my 2017 policy paper, Capitalism in Space, is spreading to other countries. » Read more

13 comments

Glaciers and mesas on Mars

2:19 pm

Overview map

Cool image time! Today we return to glacier country on Mars, that band of mensae mesas and glaciers that stretches more than 2,000 miles in the northern mid-latitudes, as shown on the overview map above.

No rovers or landers have yet visited this region, nor are any planned. To the west just beyond the map’s left edge is the planned landing site of Europe’s Franklin rover. To the east and south and just beyond the map’s right edge is where America’s Perseverance rover presently travels in Jezero Crater.

Our journey today begins from afar, and will steadily zoom into the area of the red cross and a most intriguing feature seen in a recent picture taken by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

Before we look at that high resolution image, it is better to view the area using MRO’s context camera, as what it shows helps make sense of the features in the close-up.
» Read more

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NASA now targets December 18, 2021 for launch of Webb

1:12 pm

NASA today announced that it and the European Space Agency have scheduled the Ariane 5 launch of the James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana for December 18, 2021.

The agency set the new target launch date in coordination with Arianespace after Webb recently and successfully completed its rigorous testing regimen – a major turning point for the mission. The new date also follows Arianespace successfully launching an Ariane 5 rocket in late July and scheduling a launch that will precede Webb. The July launch was the first for an Ariane 5 since August 2020.

Launching before the end of ’21 will allow NASA to claim that Webb is only be ten years behind schedule, not eleven. The cost overruns however remain astronomical (no pun intended). Initially budgeted at $500 million, Webb is now estimated to have cost $10 billion.

Once launched the telescope will take about six months to slowly move to its Lagrange point location about a million miles from the Earth, in the Earth’s shadow. During that time it will also be steadily deploying its many segmented mirror for infrared observations (an important detail as Webb is not a replacement for Hubble, which does most of its observations in the optical wavelengths).

Should deployment and placement go as planned, Webb will undoubtedly do ground-breaking astronomy, especially in the field of deep space cosmology. If anything should go wrong, any repair mission will take at a minimum five years to mount, if ever.

Keep those fingers and toes crossed!

6 comments

Report: NASA’s bad management of infrastructure projects routinely leads to cost overruns and delays

12:42 pm

A report released today [pdf] by NASA’s inspector general has found that NASA’s management of its infrastructure projects — designed to replace or upgrade existing facilities — is badly organized and routinely leads to cost overruns and delays.

According to the report, NASA has been spending about $359 million per year on its infrastructure for the past five years, about $1.8 billion. And what have we gotten from this spending? This quote from the report sums it up nicely:

Of the 20 [Construction of Facilities] projects we reviewed, 6 incurred significant cost overruns ranging from $2.2 million to $36.6 million and 16 of the projects are 3 months to more than 3 years behind their initial schedules. Costs increased primarily because requirements were not fully developed by the Agency before construction began, requirements were not fully understood by contractors, and contract prices were higher than originally estimated. Delays occurred because projects faced postponed start times and changing requirements, among other reasons. Finally, NASA did not provide effective oversight to determine whether the Agency’s portfolio of [Construction of Facilities] projects met cost, schedule, and performance goals. [Facilities and Real Estate Division] has failed to consistently keep up with oversight requirements of approved and funded projects and current oversight guidance does not align with Agency facility goals. [emphasis mine]

But don’t worry. Congress is about to pour several more billion dollars into NASA’s coffers for infrastructure work. I am sure the agency will figure out ways to go overbudget and behind schedule with this money as well.

For more than twenty years I have seen government-run projects fail miserably, across the board, Whether it be big rockets, high speed trains, military actions in foreign countries, foreign intelligence, or health policies in response to new viruses, our government routinely fails, its effort quickly falling far behind schedule while costing many times its initial budget. Worst of all, the final product is often useless or completely unable to achieve its initial stated goals.

And yet, Americans don’t seem to notice. We still turn first to government for everything. Too many of us depend on the CDC for our health advice, though its advice has been repeatedly mistaken, inconsistent, or just plain wrong for years. Others think NASA is the only one who can build and launch a manned space mission, though almost all of its in-house manned projects have been disasters for decades.

And above all, we must use our military to shape and reshape nations worldwide, though our military has done poorly in almost every war it has fought since World War II.

There are exceptions to all this, but the overall pattern is clear. As Tucker Carlson said recently, “We are led by buffoons.”
» Read more

15 comments

Today’s blacklisted American: Head of software game company forced out because he expressed a pro-life opinion

11:45 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled at Tripwire
No freedom of speech allowed in the software
and gaming industries.

They’re coming for you next: John Gipson, the co-founder and president of the software game company Tripwire, has been forced to step down because he had the nerve to issue a single tweet expressing support for Texas’s new anti-abortion law.

The tweet quickly generated intense controversy. Many individual gamers called for a boycott of Tripwire’s games, sharing tips on how to hide listings for its products in Steam’s online game store or making donations to women’s charities in Mr Gibson’s name.

Supporters of the Texas law also responded, with the original tweet clocking up nearly 13,000 replies.

But Shipwright Studios, a “work-for-hire” studio that contributed to some of Tripwire’s games, wrote it was ending a three-year relationship because of Mr Gibson’s comments. “While your politics are your own, the moment you make them a matter of public discourse you entangle all of those working for and with you,” Shipwright Studios said. “We cannot in good conscience continue to work with Tripwire under the current leadership… [and] will begin the cancellation of our existing contracts”.

Tom Banner studios, the creator of one of the games that Tripwire publishes (Chivalry 2), also came out condemning Gibson, as did several of his partners at Tripwire.

So what evil thing did Gibson say? Here is the entire content of his tweet:
» Read more

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Update on status of first orbital Starship/Superheavy

10:02 am

Capitalism in space: The first planned orbital Superheavy booster, prototype #4, has been moved back to the orbital launch site, this time with all of its 29 engines fully installed.

It appears SpaceX engineers are about to begin an extensive test campaign of this booster and its engines. They need to test the fueling of all 29 engines. They need to test fire the engines as a unit. And they need to do a full static fire of them all to see if they will work together as planned.

All these tests, which based on SpaceX’s past pace, will likely take about three to four weeks, which means that the orbital test flight cannot occurr before the end of September, as previously guessed. More likely they will not be ready to fly before the end of October, at the soonest.

That schedule is also impacted by the FAA’s bureaucracy, which still needs to approve the environmental assessment required before any Starship orbital flight. That approval process has been ongoing, but could still take several more months, especially if the effort by some fearful environmentalists to stop the flight gains political momentum.

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Astronomers discover white dwarf stars still burning hydrogen

9:50 am

The uncertainty of science: Using Hubble observations of the white dwarfs in two different globular clusters, astronomers have discovered that — contrary to the consensus opinion — some white dwarf stars are not slowly cooling embers of a dead star, but are still generating nuclear fusion by burning hydrogen in their outer layers.

Using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 the team observed [globular clusters] M3 and M13 at near-ultraviolet wavelengths, allowing them to compare more than 700 white dwarfs in the two clusters. They found that M3 contains standard white dwarfs, which are simply cooling stellar cores. M13, on the other hand, contains two populations of white dwarfs: standard white dwarfs and those which have managed to hold on to an outer envelope of hydrogen, allowing them to burn for longer and hence cool more slowly.

Comparing their results with computer simulations of stellar evolution in M13, the researchers were able to show that roughly 70% of the white dwarfs in M13 are burning hydrogen on their surfaces, slowing down the rate at which they are cooling.

This discovery could have consequences for how astronomers measure the ages of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The evolution of white dwarfs has previously been modeled as a predictable cooling process. This relatively straightforward relationship between age and temperature has led astronomers to use the white dwarf cooling rate as a natural clock to determine the ages of star clusters, particularly globular and open clusters. However, white dwarfs burning hydrogen could cause these age estimates to be inaccurate by as much as 1 billion years.

In other words, many past age estimates for star clusters could be very wrong, which in turn could mean the general understanding of the evolution of these objects could be very wrong as well.

These results also illustrate a fact that astronomers seem to always forget. The stars in any one category (white dwarfs, red super giants, yellow stars like the Sun, etc.) are not all identical, and thus their life and death processes will not all follow the predicted stages, like clockwork. Things are always far more complicated. Though the predictions might be broadly right, there will be many variations, so many that it will often be difficult to draw a generalized conclusion.

It seems that with white dwarfs astronomers have made this mistake, and now must rethink many of their conclusions.

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Firefly confirms launch failure due to the premature shutdown of one engine

9:33 am

Capitalism in space: Firefly this past weekend confirmed that its September 2nd launch failure was caused when one of the Alpha rocket’s first stage engines shut down almost immediately after liftoff.

On Sunday (Sept. 5), the company announced the proximate cause of the failure: One of Alpha’s four first-stage Reaver engines shut down unexpectedly about 15 seconds after liftoff. “The vehicle continued to climb and maintain control for a total of about 145 seconds, whereas nominal first-stage burn duration is about 165 seconds. However, due to missing the thrust of 1 of 4 engines, the climb rate was slow, and the vehicle was challenged to maintain control without the thrust vectoring of engine 2,” Alpha representatives wrote in a Twitter thread on Sunday.

“Alpha was able to compensate at subsonic speeds, but as it moved through transonic and into supersonic flight, where control is most challenging, the three-engine thrust vector control was insufficient and the vehicle tumbled out of control. The range terminated the flight using the explosive Flight Termination System (FTS). The rocket did not explode on its own,” they added.

The engine apparently did not fail or explode, it merely closed its main propellant valves so the engine was no longer being fed fuel. Though they obviously they need to find out why this happened, the nature of the failure is actually encouraging. It suggests a relatively easy fix (with a strong emphasis on the word “relatively”).

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Debris from Firefly launch rains down near launch spectators

12:38 pm

Alpha rocket exploding
Screen capture of explosion from Everyday Astronaut live stream.

When the range officer was forced to terminate the first launch of Firefly’s Alpha rocket on September 2, 2021, the subsequent explosion caused some of the debris to apparently fall near the spectators who had come out to see the launch.

Spectators who gathered across the Central Coast to watch the launch of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha rocket — a privately designed, unmanned rocket built to carry satellites — instead saw it explode midair and debris rain down on nearby areas.

“I saw this thing floating down from the sky … then another piece, then another, and then hundreds of pieces varying in size were falling,” said Mike Hecker, a resident of Solvang who was out mountain biking in the Orcutt Hills with a large group of friends. “It was surreal to have rocket debris raining down on you,” he said.

According to all reports, it appears no one was injured or even came close to getting hurt.

We need to accept such things if we wish to do great things. The range officer destroyed the rocket to make sure it did not fly in one piece into anything on the ground, something that would have certainly caused great harm. Blowing it up prevented that, though it resulted in a small risk that smaller pieces might hit something.

Once, a story like this would have been intriguing but would have bothered no one. In today’s culture — which attempts to give everyone a “safe space” even from dissenting opinions — I fear that we shall find greater restrictions soon placed on launches.

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