Timeline of Russian uranium deal and Clinton donations

2:48 pm

Link here. The timeline not only puts the quid pro quo nature of the Russian uranium deal in context, it helps clarify the players and the different parts they played. It appears this deal not only involved giving Russia control of 20 percent of American uranium, that control included the corrupt Kazakhstan government.

All told, the Clintons and the Clinton Foundation appears to have received in the range of $55 million for their help in making the deal happen, all from players who benefited financially from the deal.

23 comments

Engineers develop new technique to resume drill use on Curiosity

12:27 pm

Engineers have successfully tested a new drill procedure on a duplicate rover on Earth that bypasses the problem in Curiosity’s drill.

The problem with the drill has been its feed mechanism, which pushes the drill bit downward as it drills its hole. The tests with the duplicate rover on Earth have instead had the drill bit fully extended and used the robot arm itself to push downward. It worked, but the problem on Mars is holding the drill bit perfectly straight and not slipping sideways. They are now doing a test with Curiosity to address this.

Curiosity touched its drill to the ground Oct. 17 for the first time in 10 months. It pressed the drill bit downward, and then applied smaller sideways forces while taking measurements with a force sensor. “This is the first time we’ve ever placed the drill bit directly on a Martian rock without stabilizers,” said JPL’s Douglas Klein, chief engineer for the mission’s return-to-drilling development. “The test is to gain better understanding of how the force/torque sensor on the arm provides information about side forces.”

This sensor gives the arm a sense of touch about how hard it is pressing down or sideways. Avoiding too much side force in drilling into a rock and extracting the bit from the rock is crucial to avoid having the bit get stuck in the rock.

Stay tuned for a Mars rover update, coming shortly!

Leave a comment

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

WHO fakes data to claim weedkiller causes cancer

8:43 am

Par for the course: IARC, the agency of the World Health Organization (WHO) that focuses on cancer research, has apparently faked data so that it could make the claim — in opposition to every other published paper in the world — that a commonly used weedkiller causes cancer.

This detail about the man in charge might explain what happened:

The chairman of the IARC sub-group tasked with reviewing evidence of glyphosate’s effect on laboratory animals was Charles Jameson, an American toxicologist. In testimony as part of personal-injury lawsuits against Monsanto in the United States, Jameson told lawyers for Monsanto he did not know when, why or by whom the edits had been made.

Monsanto is facing multiple legal claims in the U.S. from plaintiffs who allege glyphosate gave them or their loved ones cancer. Jameson is an expert witness for the plaintiffs. He did not respond to questions for this article. [emphasis mine]

If you want to read the whole ugly story, go to the second link above. This report cites numerous examples where IARC clearly fudged their reports to hide the fact that their conclusions were consistently debunked by other research.

11 comments

The glory of Cassini’s Saturn

8:31 am

The glory of Saturn

Cool image time! The image on the right, reduced in resolution to post here, was taken by Cassini on August 17, 2017, one month before the spacecraft dived into Saturn to end its mission.

This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 19 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken in green light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Aug. 12, 2017. Pandora was brightened by a factor of 2 to increase its visibility.

The view was obtained at a distance to Saturn of approximately 581,000 miles (935,000 kilometers) from Saturn. Image scale is 35 miles (56 kilometers) per pixel. The distance to Pandora was 691,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) for a scale of 41 miles (66 kilometers) per pixel.

The moon Pandora can be seen in the full resolution image just beyond the outermost ring near the top of the screen.

Leave a comment

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.

SpaceX barge damaged from fire after 1st stage landing

8:22 am

The drone barge used by SpaceX to successfully land a 1st stage during its October 11 launch was subsequently damaged by a fire on board during the return to port.

The exact series of events is unclear, but it is understood the booster leaked some of its residue RP-1 fuel, which flowed along the deck of the ASDS and pooled near the containers at the aft of the drone ship.

The booster then continued post-landing operations, designed to safe the booster ahead of crews boarding the ship to complete the safing process ahead of the trip back to port. At some point shortly after landing there was an ignition of the pooled RP-1, likely via the purging of the Triethylaluminum-Triethylborane (TEA-TEB) that is used as the first stage ignitor. This has to be purged as part of the safing procedures for allowing crew near the rocket. Fire hoses – staged on the deck of the ship – quickly doused the fire. However, the garage containing the robot – nicknamed “Roomba” or “OctaGrabber” (among other names) – was caught in the fire and damaged.

This was confirmed by the lack of the robot in view under the rocket during the ASDS’ return to Port.

It appears they are repairing the damages and that future barge landings will not be affected.

Leave a comment

Iranian scientist sentenced to death

8:13 am

An Iranian judge has sentenced an Iranian scientist to execution in 20 days.

The scientist, who appears to have mostly worked in Sweden, was convicted of spying for Israel. He in turn says he was railroaded because he refused to spy on his colleagues for the Iranian intelligence service.

What baffles me here is that he was arrested when returned to Iran for a short visit. He must have known that going back was going to put him in great risk. Why do it?

3 comments

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

Could North Korea use its missiles to fill orbital space with debris?

7:52 pm

Link here. While most of the discussion about the missile threat from North Korea has focused on the possibility of it detonating a nuclear bomb high enough to cause an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that would disable most electronic equipment, this article notes that they could much more easily do almost as much harm by simply using their ballistic missiles to fill low-Earth-orbit (LEO) space with space junk, thus disabling much of the world’s military surveillance and reconnaissance satellites.

I am not sure how much of a threat this might be, but I find the article somewhat worrisome because it proposes something that seems quite reasonable and doable, with the technology that North Korea appears to have, right this minute.

12 comments

NASA still hasn’t established a baseline cost for SLS’s future missions

5:01 pm

Despite being told to do so in an 2014 GAO report, NASA has still not developed a budget to determine what it would cost to use SLS for any future beyond-Earth-orbit missions.

Worse, NASA says it doesn’t have to do this.

The government report notes that it previously recommended to NASA and Congress that costs of the first (and subsequent) human missions be calculated and disclosed three years ago in 2014. Since then, the report says, a senior official at NASA’s Exploration Systems Development program, which manages the rocket and spacecraft programs, replied that NASA does not intend to establish a baseline cost for Exploration Mission 2 because it does not have to.

This response must have struck investigators with the General Accountability Office—Congress’ auditing service—as a bit in-your-face. Later in the report, the director of acquisition and sourcing management for the accountability office, Cristina Chaplain, notes that, “While later stages of the Mars mission are well in the future, getting to that point in time will require a funding commitment from the Congress and other stakeholders. Much of their willingness to make that commitment is likely to be based on the ability to assess the extent to which NASA has met prior goals within predicted cost and schedule targets.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, NASA expects Congress to give NASA and SLS a blank check, forever. Sadly, based on the behavior of Congress now and in the past two decades, NASA might very well have reasonable expectations here.

2 comments

Trump administration backs off plans to end or reduce ethanol policy

9:48 am

The swamp wins: Scott Pruitt, EPA head, has retreated from his plans to reduce or end the program that subsidizes and encourages the use of ethanol in automobile gasoline.

After heavy pressure from lawmakers and other stakeholders, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt on Thursday night sided with pro-ethanol lawmakers and said his agency will abandon many controversial changes to the nation’s ethanol mandate — prompting a top biofuels leader to claim that Mr. Pruitt apparently has had an “epiphany” over the past few days.

In a letter to seven key senators, Mr. Pruitt — who had been critical of ethanol during his time as Oklahoma attorney general — shot down several major concerns about looming adjustments to the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), the federal law that requires the blending of ethanol with gasoline.

The letter comes just days after Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican and perhaps the loudest pro-ethanol voice in Congress, threatened to hold up nominees for top-level EPA posts if Mr. Pruitt didn’t acquiesce to their demands on the RFS.

It is going to take many years to drain the swamp, since it presently holds great power and is willing to use it to maintain its corrupt control over taxpayer money.

14 comments

Today in fascist academia

9:06 am

As I noted last week, it has gotten tiresome, depressing, and repetitive to post numerous individual links of stories each day that highlight the oppressive culture that apparently permeates much of today’s academic community. I found that by doing these posts individually, I would not post every important story.

To solve this, I have decided to periodically post the stories in a bunch, and have so far found that I still have had to do it twice a week. Below is today’s list. Check each out. The pattern that disturbs me most is that while much of the intolerance is coming from the students, the administrations and faculty of most of these schools appear quite content to either appease, or support, that intolerance.

And then there is this story from the journal Science: Analysis of China’s one-child policy sparks uproar

A new study of China’s one-child policy is roiling demography, sparking calls for the field’s leading journal to withdraw the paper. The controversy has ignited a debate over scholarly values in a discipline that some say often prioritizes reducing population growth above all else.

It is definitely worthwhile reading this story. While I have serious doubts about the scientific rigorousness of the paper in question, I find it remarkable and disturbing that the first instinct of the scientists in this field who question the paper is to demand its retraction. In other words, rather than argue their doubts and questions publicly and let the chips fall where they may, they prefer to grind their boots into the author’s face, silencing him entirely.

One comment

Vector signs deal to launch from Wallops

8:37 am

Capitalism in space: Vector has signed an agreement with the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport on Wallops Island, Virginia to do commercial launches of its smallsat rocket there.

Vector Space Systems officials and Virginia Secretary of Transportation Aubrey Layne announced during a demonstration of the Vector-R launch vehicle at Launch Pad 0-B on Wallops Island that Vector has contracted to conduct three commercial orbital missions in the next two years from the Wallops spaceport, with an option for five additional launches.

Vector still needs to complete its test program, as its Vector-R rocket has not yet reached orbit.

One comment

Wearing Mars and Moon spacesuit prototypes

6:01 pm

An evening pause: This video to me was interesting because it illustrated (though the reporter either does not realize it or is being kind by not mentioning it) how poorly designed both these suits are. They require a crew to put on something that would be impractical on either the Moon or Mars, and appears heavy and clumsy. For Mars especially a much lighter and more natural suit is going to be essential. This is not it, though I am sure it is a worthwhile first attempt.

Hat tip Edward Thelen.

9 comments

Background of Mueller’s lead investigator confirms it is a witch hunt

5:43 pm

Link here. The article provides some detailed information about the background of Robert Mueller’s chief investigator, Andrew Weissmann, that strongly illustrates the likelihood that Mueller’s investigation is the witch hunt.

Time after time, courts have reversed Weissmann’s most touted “victories” for his tactics. This is hardly the stuff of a hero in the law.

Weissmann, as deputy and later director of the Enron Task Force, destroyed the venerable accounting firm of Arthur Andersen LLP and its 85,000 jobs worldwide — only to be reversed several years later by a unanimous Supreme Court.

Next, Weissmann creatively criminalized a business transaction between Merrill Lynch and Enron. Four Merrill executives went to prison for as long as a year. Weissmann’s team made sure they did not even get bail pending their appeals, even though the charges Weissmann concocted, like those against Andersen, were literally unprecedented. Weissmann’s prosecution devastated the lives and families of the Merrill executives, causing enormous defense costs, unimaginable stress and torturous prison time. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the mass of the case.

Weissmann quietly resigned from the Enron Task Force just as the judge in the Enron Broadband prosecution began excoriating Weissmann’s team, and the press began catching on to Weissmann’s modus operandi.

Links are provided to every one of Weissmann’s previous cases above. I clicked on each, and confirmed that not only did he intimidate witnesses, each one of these major prosecutions was thrown out because of aggressive improprieties. Weissmann approach is to find a crime, and prosecute it, whether any real crime occurred or not.

I post once again below the fold the Congressional testimony of “Republican” Robert Mueller when he was head of the FBI and was being questioned about the investigation he was leading into the Obama administration’s use of the IRS to harass its political opponents. It illustrates forcefully how much a tool Mueller was, and is, for the Democratic Party.
» Read more

7 comments

NASA instrument for European space telescope flawed and must be rebuilt

5:29 pm

The NASA instrument for Europe’s Euclid optical/near-infrared space telescope has been found defective and must be rebuilt, thus delaying the launch of the telescope by at least one year.

What interested me about this telescope is its goals and specifications:

Euclid is a two-ton space telescope selected by ESA in 2011 as a medium-class mission in its Cosmic Vision program of space science missions. The spacecraft features a 1.2-meter telescope with visible and near-infrared instruments to study dark energy and dark matter, which combined account for about 95 percent of the universe. Euclid will operate at the Earth-sun L-2 Lagrange point, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, that is used by other infrared astronomy missions.

With a mirror about half the size of Hubble’s, this telescope will act as a partial replacement and back up for it. In fact, it will likely make numerous ground-breaking discoveries, as every optical telescope placed above the atmosphere has so far done.

Meanwhile, the article provided no information on the flaws, who built the flawed instrument, and who will pay for the delays its failure will cause.

One comment

Blue Origin successfully completes first test of BE-4 rocket engine

5:22 pm

Capitalism in space: Blue Origin has successfully conducted the first static fire test of its BE-4 rocket engine.

The test was six seconds long. The company has not released any further details, other than to say it was a success. This not only puts them closer to building their New Glenn rocket, it increases the chances that ULA will choose this engine for its Vulcan rocket.

One comment

Juno’s first hints of Jupiter’s interior

5:17 pm

Data from Juno not only suggests that the gas giant has a small fuzzy core, its storms appear to extend thousands of miles into the interior.

By studying Jupiter’s gravitational field, researchers can probe thousands of kilometres into the planet. On each close fly-by, Juno measures the planet’s complex gravitational tug. These observations have already revealed that Jupiter has a small, ‘fuzzy’, poorly defined core.

The latest results show that Jupiter’s gravitational field is askew, with different patterns in its northern and southern hemispheres, said Tristan Guillot, a planetary scientist at the Observatory of the Côte d’Azur in Nice, France. That suggests that its hydrogen-rich gas is flowing asymmetrically deep in the planet. “This is something that was not expected,” Guillot said at the meeting. “We were not sure at all whether we would be able to see that.”

Another clue to the structure of Jupiter’s interior came from how the gravity field varies with depth. Theoretical studies predict that the bigger the gravity signal, the stronger the flow of gas deep down. That information is important for teasing out whether all of Jupiter’s interior is rotating as a single solid body, or whether different layers spin separately from one another, like a set of nesting Russian dolls moving within each other.

Juno detected a gravity signal powerful enough to indicate that material is flowing as far down as 3,000 kilometres. “We’re just taking the clouds and the winds and extending them into the interior,” Kaspi said. Future work could help to pinpoint how strong the flow is at various depths, which could resolve whether Jupiter’s interior really resembles Russian dolls.

What is especially fascinating is that this first study of Jupiter shows it to appear so very different than Cassini’s first look at Saturn. Their polar regions are completely different, their storms are different, even their horizontal bands behave and look different. As I’ve said numerous times, the one given in planetary exploration is that every single planetary object we look at will be completely different from every other object.

Leave a comment

NASA extends Dawn’s mission orbiting Ceres

2:11 pm

NASA has decided to extend the Dawn mission again, but have that extension remain in orbit around Ceres.

A priority of the second Ceres mission extension is collecting data with Dawn’s gamma ray and neutron spectrometer, which measures the number and energy of gamma rays and neutrons. This information is important for understanding the composition of Ceres’ uppermost layer and how much ice it contains.

The spacecraft also will take visible-light images of Ceres’ surface geology with its camera, as well as measurements of Ceres’ mineralogy with its visible and infrared mapping spectrometer.

The extended mission at Ceres additionally allows Dawn to be in orbit while the dwarf planet goes through perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, which will occur in April 2018. At closer proximity to the Sun, more ice on Ceres’ surface may turn to water vapor, which may in turn contribute to the weak transient atmosphere detected by the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory before Dawn’s arrival. Building on Dawn’s findings, the team has hypothesized that water vapor may be produced in part from energetic particles from the Sun interacting with ice in Ceres’ shallow surface.Scientists will combine data from ground-based observatories with Dawn’s observations to further study these phenomena as Ceres approaches perihelion.

They aim to get as close as 120 miles of the surface during this extension, half as close as the previous closest approach.

Leave a comment

NOAA declares record-setting warming where it has no data

11:20 am

NOAA’s September update on the climate has declared that central and southern Africa experienced “record warmth,” even though NOAA itself admits it has no ground data for this region, and the satellite data shows temperatures normal.

Except for the satellite data, which comes from a different research source, all the graphs at the second link are from NOAA itself. Despite admitting in one graph that they have zero data for most of Africa, they declare in a different graph that most of Africa experienced record-setting warming.

This is not the first time NOAA has done this. I noted similar intellectual dishonesty by NOAA two years ago. In the interim they have followed this pattern repeatedly, claiming new warming records all over the globe in many areas where they have absolutely no surface data and the satellite data remains inconclusive.

There is an intellectual corruption in the climate field, especially within government agencies like NOAA, that is ruining our ability to really learn what is going on with the climate. And until someone in power steps in and either demands a forthright explanation that justifies these actions (something that I think is impossible) or demands that it stop, this corruption is only going to get worse.

3 comments

China to begin development of its own SLS rocket

9:50 am

The new colonial movement: Even as China struggles to fix the problems that caused the launch failure in July of its newest most powerful rocket, Long March 5, it is about to start work on a new heavy-lift rocket, Long March 9, that will be able to lift 140 tons into orbit and make it more powerful than the Saturn 5 and comparable to the still unbuilt most powerful version of SLS.

Meanwhile, this article reveals that the reason engineers lost control of Tiangong-1, their first space station module, was because of the failure of the charger for the spacecraft’s batteries. Essentially, the module has no power.

Interestingly, this is the exact same thing that happened to the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 space station in 1985. In that case, however, the Soviet Union had the time and the capability to put together a manned rescue mission where two cosmonauts docked with the dead station and brought it back to life.

8 comments

Budget cuts for Roscosmos in 2017

9:41 am

The budget problems in Russia continue, with the government revealing today that the budget for Roscosmos in 2017 was cut by about $1 billion, and that the budget for the next two years will remain essentially flat.

Roscosmos and the Russian press periodically make grand announcements about what they plan to do, but all their plans end up, like NASA’s SLS, being delayed endlessly. This is how government operations operate. The goal really isn’t to build anything for sale, but to create make-work jobs.

Leave a comment

Iridium switches two upcoming launches to reused Falcon 9 first stages

9:35 am

Capitalism in space: Iridium has revised its launch agreements for two upcoming launches using the Falcon 9 rocket to have both use previously flown first stages.

While the article provides a lot of good background on SpaceX’s increasing sales of reused first stages, including the fact that 20% of SpaceX’s launches this year might end up using re-used first stages, an amazing number consider this is also the first year they are doing so, this quote from the article however is even more astonishing:

Importantly for Iridium, and for the launch market as a whole, Iridium revealed in its announcement that the cost of insuring the Iridium NEXT-4 and -5 missions did not change with the switch to flight-proven boosters. “Iridium confirmed with its insurers that there is no increase in premium for the launch program as a result of the use of flight-proven Falcon 9 rockets, further supporting Iridium’s conclusion that the risk profile is unchanged,” noted the release.

Overall, this is an excellent sign that the all-important insurance market element of spaceflight continues to see no increased risk with launching atop flight-proven boosters.

One of my sources close to SpaceX says that the company will likely not fly these reused first stages intact more than twice, but will still salvage the engines for additional reuses. Considering the engines are the most expensive component, this makes great sense. Even if SpaceX doesn’t fly a first stage intact, it has developed an efficient and effective method for recovering the engines for reuse.

One comment

Thomas Jefferson’s legal reading list going on line

3:24 pm

The almost four hundred legal books that Thomas Jefferson recommended all lawyers should read are about to go on line for everyone to read.

The book list goes back to the creation of the University of Virginia, a project Jefferson took on after he finished serving two terms as America’s third president. A voracious reader himself, Jefferson believed the school’s library would be the heart of the new university, which opened in 1825. So he drew up a list of about 7,000 books ranging in topic from agriculture to zoology that he believed the school should have in its collections. At the time, books were pricey, and Jefferson thought part of the duty of the university was to make great works available for study. “Great standard works of established reputation, too voluminous and too expensive for private libraries, should have a place in every public library, for the free resort of individuals,” Jefferson wrote of the list of works he drew up.

The books were the starting point for the university’s collection, but they didn’t last. Most were destroyed in an 1895 fire that gutted a historic campus building called the Rotunda, the same building that was the endpoint of an August torch-light rally by white nationalists whose demonstration in the city the following day over the removal of a Confederate statue descended into chaos.

It was a law librarian at the university who, 40 years ago, got the idea of re-creating the collection of law books Jefferson recommended. Since then, the university has collected 336 of the 375 legal works listed by Jefferson, a lawyer himself. It’s those works that are now being put online.

I guarantee that a reading of these books would also teach any lawyer about the philosophical foundations of western and British culture, based on individual rights, freedom, and the rule of law.

2 comments
1 … 536 537 538 539 540 … 1,106