In Belize

8:40 pm

After two flights and a two hour drive I am now with the rest of the expedition in the Maya Mountain Lodge near San Ignacio on the western side of Belize. Tomorrow we go on our first survey trip to Mountain Cow Cave, a popular wild cave that tours periodically visit. We are surveying it for the local authorities so they have a better idea of what they have and can better protect it.

My internet connection here is slow, so posting will be less than I would like. Also, we will be spending most of our time caving. So don’t expect a lot of posting for the next week. I shouldn’t say that, as then all my readers will flee, but I have to be honest.

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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 or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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

Off to Belize

9:30 am

This Friday morning I am leaving for Belize for a week long cave expedition. I do not know if I will have the time or internet access to post as normal. Moreover, the days will be spent underground surveying and pushing new cave passages, so if I do any posting it will be in the evenings. In addition, some of us will also be heading to Guatemala for a day to visit the ruins at Tikal.

I have never been to Belize before. If I can’t post there I will definitely post my impressions of my travels upon my return.

Posted from El Paso, Texas.

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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.

Republican-led Senate passes spending bill larger than requested by Obama

5:47 pm

Feeding the anger: A bill passed today by the Republican-led Senate included more funding that originally requested by the Obama administration.

Moving legislation and avoiding fights has been a top election year priority for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Kentucky Republican wants the GOP Senate to prove that Republicans can govern by avoiding a one-and-done omnibus spending package at the end of the year. But the energy and water bill received little fanfare from Senate conservatives. They complain that the measure, which funds the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Interior, spends $261 million more than even Obama requested.

Sen. Mike Lee described the legislation as “simply unacceptable in a time of rising debt and slower economic growth.” The Utah Republican told The Daily Signal that “we’re never going to get our nation’s rising deficits under control until we can stick to our previous agreements on spending levels,” referring to the limits set in the 2011 Budget Control Act.

Though Congress has not passed a budget resolution, the Senate started advancing spending bills at levels established in the 2015 Bipartisan Budget Act, which increased government discretionary spending by $30 billion above the 2011 caps.

Still Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told The Daily Signal he’s glad the appropriations process has gotten off the ground finally. “This is the first time this appropriation bill has passed the Senate since 2009,” Lankford, who sits on the Senate Appropriations Committee, explained. “To avoid last-minute continuing resolutions, backroom deals and omnibus bills, we must move bills through a regular order appropriations process.”

These guys just don’t get it. There is a reason that Trump and Cruz dominated their party’s presidential campaign, and it wasn’t because they were calling for Congress to advance big spending bills in Congress quickly.

Posted from El Paso, Texas.

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Court rules against illegal Obamacare subsidies

11:09 am

Finding out what’s not in it: A federal court ruled today that the Obama administration had no legal right to issue subsidies to insurers that have not been appropriated by Congress.

The court was quite blunt about the White House’s illegal activities here:

Paying out Section 1402 reimbursements without an appropriation thus violates the Constitution. Congress authorized reduced cost sharing but did not appropriate monies for it, in the FY 2014 budget or since. Congress is the only source for such an appropriation, and no public money can be spent without one. See U.S. Constitution, Art. I, § 9, cl. 7 (“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law . . . .”). The Secretaries’ textual and contextual arguments fail.

Not surprisingly, the Obama administration rejects the court’s decision.

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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

Airbus initiates smallsat launcher project

9:25 am

The competition heats up: Airbus has begun a project to develop a smallsat commercial launch rocket, competitive with Rocket Lab’s Electron and Virgin Galactic’s LaunchOne, aimed at the cubesat and nanosat satellite market.

The source for the story was unnamed, and also gave few details, so it is hard to know how real this is. What I gather however is that we might be seeing the beginnings of a long term split in the launch market, with one set of big rockets designed to launch human-related payloads, including humans, and a second set of small rockets focused on launching unmanned satellites.

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ULA’s CEO explains why they are retiring Delta

9:06 am

Tory Bruno, the CEO of ULA, explained in an op-ed today why his company is discontinuing its use of Boeing’s Delta family of rockets and focusing exclusively on Lockheed Martin’s Atlas 5 and its eventual replacement, the Vulcan Centaur.

Delta is an amazing rocket, but it’s costly to produce. Its burnt-orange foam insulation has to be applied by hand. Its production line is bigger and more complex than Atlas’s. And its components are pricier.

Bruno’s purpose with this op-ed is to convince Congress to leave his company alone while they develop the new Vulcan rocket. Congress keeps proposing outlawing use of the Atlas 5 with its Russian engines, and Bruno does not want that, at least not until the Vulcan is flying. He is also trying to reduce his costs by discontinuing Delta, which in turn would allow him to lower prices for his Atlas 5 and compete more effectively with SpaceX.

Though I understand Congress’s concerns, I do find it sad that in modern America a private businessman has to lobby Congress for the right to run his company as he sees fit.

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First manned Starliner flight delayed

8:53 am

Boeing has revealed that the first manned flight of Starliner will be delayed until 2018.

This delay for Boeing is not really a surprise. Unlike SpaceX, the company had done very little actual development work on the capsule before winning its contract from NASA. They therefore have a lot more to do to become flight worthy. My one worry is their contract. If the contract is fixed price, as with the original cargo contracts awarded SpaceX and Orbital ATK, Boeing will have no incentive to delay, as they won’t be paid anything until they achieve specific milestones and will get no additional monies to cover the added costs of the delay. If the contract is cost-plus, however, NASA’s traditional contract system used for SLS, Orion, and almost every other boondoggle since the 1960s, then Boeing will be paid regardless of the delay, and NASA will also be on the hook for paying the additional delay costs, thus giving Boeing an incentive to slow walk the construction.

I think the contract was fixed-price, but am not sure. Anyone out there have an answer?

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Jimmy Eat World – The Middle

6:01 pm

An evening pause: I normally find myself very bored with “official” music videos. The stories are almost always the same, centered on the imagined profound angst of adolescent teen-age emotions. This video however does a nice job of mixing the music with the story, in a somewhat creative and different way, even if the angst is still the same.

Hat tip Wayne DeVette.

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A Kuiper belt object turns out to be large

5:44 pm

New observations of Kuiper Belt object 2007 OR10 have found it to be the largest unnamed object in the solar system, 955 miles across and about two-thirds the diameter of Pluto.

It also appears to rotate slowly, with each day about 45 hours long.

These results are decidedly uncertain, so don’t put much money on them. Nonetheless, the data continues to suggest that there are a lot of objects out there beyond Pluto.

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Why Trump and Cruz dominated campaign

10:27 am

Three stories today illustrate forcefully why voters in 2016 chose Donald Trump first as their Republican presidential candidate, with Ted Cruz a very strong second, while rejecting forcefully the establishment standard-bearers such as Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and John Kasich.

The first story shows video of Hillary Clinton baffled because a businesswoman’s health insurance costs doubled since Obamacare was passed. Watch the video. She can’t even consider the possibility that Obamacare is the cause. She in fact says it is “a big step forward” only to have hostile groans ripple through the audience. Later she bluntly says “”What could have possibly raised your costs $400? That’s what I don’t understand?” and members of the audience once again laugh at this blindness.

Everyone knows that Obamacare has been a disaster that is driving costs up. Clinton refuses to recognize that, which is why she is having so much trouble clinching her party’s nomination, and why people dislike her so much.

The second story is about an investigation being launched by Senator John Thune (R-South Dakota) and Senate Republicans into the squelching of conservative news stories by Facebook. Rather than figure out how to get some control over the budget, these clowns want to harass a private company. Facebook’s actions might have been politically motivated, dishonest, and aimed at censoring conservative viewpoints, but they were also entirely legal under the first amendment. As noted here, the Senate has no business investigating Facebook. The Republicans calling for this investigation should sit down and shut up. Moreover, by even focusing on this Thune is demonstrating why the Republicans who now run Congress have failed so miserably in garnering voter support.

The third story is an example why Cruz, and Trump, were successful and popular with voters In his return to Washington, Ted Cruz didn’t whine about his defeat by Trump, or attack or insult the voters. Instead, he focused in on why Trump and he did well.

“All across this country people are hungry for change. This election cycle should be a wake-up call to Washington, D.C.,” the senator from Texas said outside his office. “The frustration and volcanic anger with Washington was echoed throughout this election.”

If the Republicans had for example simply done what Ted Cruz has tried to do in Congress these past few years, get Obamacare defunded, even if it meant closing down the government, they might not now be faced with having Donald Trump as their standard-bearer. By refusing to fight for the things the voters wanted, they disqualified themselves in the voters eyes, which is why they lost.

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Texas town regulates SpaceX engine tests

9:36 am

Nice rocket company you got here. It would be a shame if something happened to it: The city council of McGregor, Texas, has imposed new regulations and fines on SpaceX should it perform rocket engine tests at its facility there in a manner the council does not like.

Though the city council was entirely within its rights, and the ban on night testing make sense, in reading the list of fines and regulations I couldn’t help thinking that they will in the end only accomplish one thing: to drive SpaceX away. This regulation in particular stood out:

The actual launching of any vehicle into the atmosphere or into space is specifically prohibited at the McGregor facility.

This would appear to ban SpaceX from doing any more hover tests of the Falcon 9 first stage. For an innovative company like SpaceX to operate as it wants, it needs the freedom to operate as it wants. These restrictions could prevent the company from doing so.

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A bibliography of my research into climate

4:29 pm

The recent long and refreshing debate thread on the subject of climate change between myself and others on Behind the Black has prompted me to upload my bibliography of the research I did on climate change and the sun’s influence from 2002 to 2010.

This bibliography, which is quite long, can be found here. I have also added a link to it in the top menu just below the banner at the top of the page

Though I stopped adding new entries to this bibliography in 2010, my research has not ceased. I just don’t update the bibliography anymore.

I make it available partly as a reference to my readers, and partly as a document to show that I base my opinions on solid research. I might not be a climate scientist, but I have made sure that I have a solid understanding of the science before speaking publicly about it. I think it wise that more people do the same.

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Wyoming rancher beats EPA over stock pond

2:29 pm

Good news: A Wyoming rancher who built a stock pond on his property, after obtaining all local permits, and was then hit by the EPA with gigantic fines totaling more than $16 million if he didn’t remove it, has won his case in court.

Under the settlement, Johnson’s pond will remain and he won’t pay any fines or concede any federal jurisdiction to regulate the pond. And the government won’t pursue any further enforcement actions based on the pond’s construction. The only conditions, according to Johnson’s lawyers, are that willow trees be planted around the pond and a partial fence installed to “control livestock.” “This is a victory for common sense and the environment, and it brings an end to all the uncertainty and fear that the Johnson family faced,” said Jonathan Wood, a staff attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation who represented Andy Johnson in his court challenge to the EPA, and in negotiating the settlement.

“The EPA never identified any environmental problems with the pond,” Wood told FoxNews.com. “In fact, it’s been a boom for the environment.”

Though he won his case, because there apparently was no cost to the EPA for attacking him it is really the EPA that has won. In the future I expect them to use their ability to impose fines more widely in even more egregious situations, knowing it will cost the agency nothing and might gain them more power. It will worth it, since the only way to stop them would be to hire lawyers and spend a lot of money in court.

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NASA uses computer model to find exoplanets

11:26 am

Garbage in, garbage out: Using statistical computer modeling only, NASA today announced that they are certain that almost a third of Kepler’s candidate exoplanets are really exoplanets.

Analysis was performed on the Kepler space telescope’s July 2015 planet candidate catalog, which identified 4,302 potential planets. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet is greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of “planet.” An additional 1,327 candidates are more likely than not to be actual planets, but they do not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 are more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also validated 984 candidates previously verified by other techniques.

This is actually a stupid announcement. They haven’t learned a damn thing from this statistical analysis, but are merely saying that because Kepler found a lot of candidates, a lot of those candidates must be real planets. Worse, NASA is also implying here that confirming some of these candidate exoplanets by hard observations is now really unnecessary, since they can do it statistically.

This smacks of the corruption that has ruined much of climate research, allowing a computer model to replace actual observations. Big mistake. But I also suspect this announcement occurred for the same reasons: NASA wishes to justify its work and its funding, and thus decided to make a big deal about this very minor statistical analysis in order to puff up the discoveries of Kepler, even though there is no reason to do so.

I expect a lot of mainstream news organizations to write big puff pieces extolling this announcement in the coming days, which will once again prove that almost no one in journalism today has the slightest ability to apply their own independent analysis to the press releases they receive.

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Harvard researchers discover that Obamacare isn’t working

9:50 am

Finding out what’s in it: A Harvard research study has found that the program in Obamacare designed to improve hospital care has had no effect, and essentially is not working.

Or, to put it another way, in exchange for increasing regulations and cost, we have gotten nothing in return.

Gee, I seem to remember a lot of unwashed, uneducated rubes from the backwaters of flyover country saying loudly that these programs in Obamacare would not work, back in 2010. Too bad these brilliant Harvard experts considered themselves too smart to pay any attention.

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Computer simulation models Sun’s magnetic field during grand minimum

9:11 am

The uncertainty of science: A computer simulation, run for six months on a supercomputer, suggests that during grand minimums in the Sun’s solar cycle, when there are no sunspots for decades, its magnetic field remains strong but descends into the star’s interior.

I think this statement by the leader of the science team is most informative:

‘The Sun as such is impossible to replicate on present-day computers – or those of the near future – due to its strong turbulence. And indeed we are not claiming that this modelling would really be the Sun. Instead, it is a 3D construction of various solar phenomena by means of which the star that runs our space climate can be better understood,’ Käpylä explains.

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More problems at Khrunichev

9:00 am

Construction of the second Angara rocket, built by the Russian organization Khrunichev, is behind schedule by at least three months.

[T]he reason for the lag is the delay with the supply of components, as well as the production setup in Omsk, the long period of checks and the lack of certain equipment for testing. In Moscow, the units will pass additional testing and the carrier rocket will be assembled, after which the launch vehicle will be transported to the Plesetsk cosmodrome (Arkhangelsk region) for the pre-launch preparation.

It is interesting to note the circuitous route the rocket’s parts must travel before launch. Kind of reminds me of the way Congress distributed SLS, and how ESA distributed Ariane 5, in order to spread the wealth and put pork in as many places as possible, regardless of how it increased production cost.

Meanwhile, the delay suggests again that Khrunichev’s quality control problems, seen repeatedly with launch failures of its Proton rocket, have not been solved with the new Angara rocket.

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Iran completes another ballistic missile test

3:45 pm

Does this make you feel safer? Iran has successfully completed another ballistic missile test with a rocket capable of reaching Israel and most of the Middle East.

And does the Obama administration response below ease your mind?

The rogue nation conducted the test in defiance of a United Nations resolution that calls on Iran to cease work on its ballistic missile program. “Iran has to abide by U.N. resolutions with regard to ballistic missiles tests, and if they have violated or not been consistent with those resolutions, that clearly would be a concern for us,” Pentagon Press Secretary Peter Cook said.

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New analysis says it ain’t aliens at strange star

2:17 pm

The uncertainty of science: A new analysis of old star data has concluded that KIC 8462852, also known Tabby’s Star and subject to random fluctuations that no scientist can explain, has not dimmed by 20% in the past century.

This reduces the chances that the fluctuations are caused by the slow accumulating construction of a Dyson sphere by an alien civilization, as some have proposed, but it still does nothing to explain the star’s random changes in brightness.

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