SpaceX to reduces chance of first stage recovery on SES-9 launch

10:06 pm

In the heat of competition: Because of SpaceX’s delays in launching the SES-9 communications satellite, the company has modified the launch profile of its Falcon 9 rocket, abandoning a land vertical landing and reducing the odds for a successful barge landing, in order to get the satellite to its proper orbit sooner.

SES will thus be able to generate income from the satellite at about the same time it would have had their launch not been delayed. SpaceX meanwhile will still try to recover the first stage, but will face much more difficult odds.

One industry official familiar with the SES-9 mission said Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX has not abandoned hope of recovering the first stage after a landing on an offshore platform positioned for the mission. But the chances of success are much less given the launch trajectory agreed to with SES to reduce the time to arrival at its operating position.

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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

The long decline to solar minimum

4:40 pm

On Monday NOAA released its monthly update of the solar cycle, showing the Sun’s sunspot activity in January. As I have done every month since 2010, I am posting it here with annotations to give it context.

What strikes me about this month’s continuing and steady decline in sunspots is how much it illustrates the long and steady nature of the ramp down to solar minimum, even for cycles that are very active. If you look at the ramp down during the previous solar cycle on the graph below the fold, it took four full years to reach solar minimum from a comparable sunspot level to what we have today.
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NASA bans employees from writing the word “Jesus”

10:04 am

The new fascism: Lawyers at NASA have ruled that the agency has the right to ban the use of the word “Jesus” in any email written by employees.

In a letter sent Monday, the Liberty Institute stated that NASA lawyers pressured a group of employees at the Johnson Space Center to remove the word “Jesus” from a club announcement. This demand took place in May and June of 2015.

These employees had formed a private group within the agency called the JSC Praise and Worship Club, an entity separate from the agency. As part of the group, employees meet together during lunch to pray, and no one is prevented from taking part in the group’s activities. In an announcement email, one of the employees had used the word “Jesus.” A few days after the email went out, NASA lawyers clamped down and said the use of the word was absolutely unacceptable and would not accept the group’s offer to issue any kind of disclaimer to downplay its use.

NASA is now going to be sued by these individuals, as the agency is clearly acting to deny them their first amendment rights. And NASA deserves to be sued, and to lose badly in court. It is absurd that those NASA lawyers can construe the writing of the word “Jesus” by a single employee as an endorsement by the agency of that religion. These same lawyers would have also acted to ban the Apollo 8 astronauts from reading from the Old Testament while in orbit around the Moon in 1968. They are thus no different than the Soviet overlords with whom we were fighting the Cold War at the time.

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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.

A new Japanese X-ray telescope to launch February 12

9:53 am

Third time the charm? Japan will launch on Friday a new X-ray telescope, the third time they have attempted to put this type of observatory into orbit.

Astro-H, which according to Japanese custom will be renamed upon successful launch, will collect the X-ray spectra for large deep space objects like galaxy clusters. An American scientist, Richard Kelley, has been trying to get this kind of instrument launched since 1984. First his instrument was dropped from Chandra because of cost. Then, two attempts to launch it by Japan failed, one when the rocket failed during launch and the second when the spacecraft itself failed soon after reaching orbit.

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North Korea’s satellite tumbling

9:45 am

U.S. Defense officials stated today that the satellite that North Korea launched on Sunday is now tumbling in orbit and is useless.

Do not take comfort from this failure. North Korea has demonstrated that it can put payloads in orbit. From this achievement it is a very short leap to aiming those payloads to impact any continent on Earth. They might not be able to aim that impact very accurately, but if you want to ignite an atomic bomb somewhere, you don’t have to be very accurate.

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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

A second Little Ice Age uncovered

9:34 am

The uncertainty of science: New data, compiled from tree rings in Russia, suggests that a previously undetected little ice age occurred in the 6th and 7th centuries, caused by a combination of volcanoes and low sunspot counts.

This cold spell would have preceded the Medieval Warm Period centered around 1000 AD that was followed by the already known Little Ice Age centered around 1600 AD. Note that no fossil fuel regulations or carbon taxes were used in creating this cold period. Note also this description of the consequences of that cold period:

The poor climate may been one of many factors contributing to societal changes of the era, including widespread crop failures and famines in Central Asia that may have triggered migrations from the area to China and Eastern Europe, thus helping spread an episode of plague (depicted in this 15th century painting) that originated there.

Famine and plague, caused by extreme cold, illustrating starkly that cooling is a far greater threat to human survival than climate warming. Meanwhile, the Medieval Warm Period saw a flourishing of American Indian culture in the American southwest.

I have always wondered why our modern climate doom-sayers fear warming so much, when there is no data to justify that fear, and plenty of data to suggest otherwise.

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Marlene Dietrich – Lili Marleen

6:01 pm

An evening pause: The song, aired initially during World War II by the Nazis for their troops, became a popular hit for soldiers on both sides of the war. Marlene Dietrich then recorded it as part of her effort to win the war for the Allies, in both English and German. She noted once that the German version is “darker”. Here is the English version.

Hat tip Engine Mike.

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One dead, four ill, in drug study in France

10:54 am

A drug study in France has caused the death of one person and the possible permanent brain injury to four others.

A government investigation states that the company running the test committed some major errors when the first person experienced ill effects and was hospitalized. The company, Biotrial, did not pay close attention to that person’s condition before proceeding with tests and giving additional dosages of the test drug to subjects. It also did not, as required by its own disclosure statement to the test subjects, inform them that one patient had been hospitalized so they would have all the information necessary to decide whether to continue.

The investigations third complaint, that Biotrial did not inform the government of these issues, is mostly a complaint by government officials that there weren’t treated with the due respect they deserve, and is less important in my mind.

Read the article, as it is disturbing that a research company could be so cavalier about the lives of the human beings it is using as test subjects.

This story also illustrates indirectly the significant decline in the state of today’s modern mainstream press as well as the greater interests of the general public. This is a major science story. For a clinical drug study to kill one of its test subjects is a big deal. Yet I am certain that this will get no coverage in any cable news outlet. (If anyone see a video story about this, please let me know.) The written news outlets on the web will likely do a story, but it will not give it wide exposure.

Worse however is the reason why these outlets will likely not care much about this story. As I like to say, it is the audience that counts. News organizations cover stories that they think their readers or viewers are interested in, and they, like their audiences, are simply not interested in very much these days. Our society is becoming increasingly close-minded and childish, interested only in shallow reports about subjects that are not very important (such the poll numbers in New Hampshire or whether Marco Rubio wears silly boots).

Any interest in a story about how a drug study killed a person and might have caused permanent brain damage to four others? Nah, that’s no fun! Let’s focus instead on how Donald Trump told Jeb Bush to shut up during last nights debate!

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TMT to repeat hearings before state

9:27 pm

After years of doing everything the state of Hawaii demanded in order to get permission to build the Thirty Meter Telescope, a state judge today ordered that the whole process should start over again.

Since this order was instigated by the protesters, and that it appears the government favors those protesters, I expect that there is no chance TMT will ever get approval to build in Hawaii. Though the university consortium building the telescope says they want to go through the new process to get permission, they are wasting their time. It will never happen. The peasants with the pitchforks and burning torches, terrified of new knowledge while preferring the worship of a mountain, are in control in Hawaii.

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Experts: NASA’s SLS Mars proposals bunk

9:48 am

The death of SLS begins: At House hearings this week, congressmen listened to several space experts who lambasted NASA’s asteroid and Mars mission proposals.

Paul Spudis of the Lunar and Planetary Institute and an expert on lunar science, was especially harsh.

“America’s civil space program is in disarray, with many aspirations and hopes but few concrete, realizable plans for future missions or strategic direction,” he said, adding that NASA lacks what it needs to pull off the mission (and throwing some shade at the agency’s strong Twitter game). “We pretend that we are on a ‘#JourneytoMars’ but in fact, possess neither the technology nor the economic resources necessary to undertake a human Mars mission now or within the foreseeable future. What is needed is a logically arranged set of short-term, realizable space goals–a series of objectives and destinations that are not only interesting in and of themselves, but whose attainment build space faring capability in the long term.”

The testimony claimed that it could cost anywhere from $500 billion to $1 trillion for NASA to get humans to Mars, numbers that are reasonable based on using NASA’s very costly and overpriced SLS/Orion rocket and capsule. The congressmen were of course interested in this, not because they want to get to Mars, but because they see gobs of pork for their districts in these numbers.

However, I expect that when SpaceX begins successfully launching its Falcon Heavy rocket in the next two years while simultaneously putting humans in space with its Dragon capsule, and does both for a tenth the cost of SLS/Orion, those same congressmen will dump SLS/Orion very quickly. Though they want the pork, they also know they don’t have $500 billion to $1 trillion to spend on space. The private sector gives them an option that is both affordable and of strong self-interest. The more realistically priced and designed hardware of private companies will give them a more credible opportunity to fund pork in their districts.

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SpaceX promises increase in Falcon 9 launch rate

9:31 am

The competition heats up: Even as SpaceX upgrades its Falcon 9 rocket as a result of tests of the returned first stage, the company said this week that it plans to increase its production and launch rate significantly in 2016.

“We’ve had the luxury in years past of having to build only a few rockets a year,” [Company official Gwynne Shotwell] said, “so we really weren’t in a production mode.” Last year would have been the first to require a high production rate of the rocket, she said, had it not been for the June launch failure that halted flights for nearly six months. “Now we’re in this factory transformation to go from building six or eight a year to about 18 cores a year. By the end of this year we should be at over 30 cores per year,” she said. “So you see the factory start to morph.”

Those changes, she said, include doubling the number of first stages that can be assembled at one time from three to six. The company is also working to accelerate production of the Merlin engines that power the Falcon 9 since, at the higher production rates planned for this year, the company will need to build hundreds of engines a year.

She also said that they hope to reach a cadence of a launch every two to three weeks.

We shall see. While I have confidence in SpaceX’s ultimate ability to achieve these promises, much can change as they ramp up their effort. For example, Shotwell noted that they had hoped to achieve this launch rate in 2015, but were stopped after the June launch failure.

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The floating mountains of Pluto

9:09 am

Pluto's floating mountains

The New Horizons science team has released a new image of Pluto’s smooth heart-shaped area, dubbed Sputnik Planum, focusing this time on the mountains of water ice that pop up through the plain and are apparently floating on the nitrogen sea, having broken off from the shoreline.

Because water ice is less dense than nitrogen-dominated ice, scientists believe these water ice hills are floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move over time like icebergs in Earth’s Arctic Ocean. The hills are likely fragments of the rugged uplands that have broken away and are being carried by the nitrogen glaciers into Sputnik Planum. ‘Chains’ of the drifting hills are formed along the flow paths of the glaciers. When the hills enter the cellular terrain of central Sputnik Planum, they become subject to the convective motions of the nitrogen ice, and are pushed to the edges of the cells, where the hills cluster in groups reaching up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) across.

I have significantly cropped the image to show it here. Be sure and check out the full version, because there is a wealth of fascinating details in it.

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China releases images from lunar rover and lander

10:33 am

Yutu on the Moon

China has made available a new batch of very cool images taken by its Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover, and Emily Lakdawalla at the Planetary Society has figured out how to view them.

In a recent guest blog post, Quanzhi Ye pointed to the Chinese version of the Planetary Data System, and shared the great news that Chang’e 3 lander data are now public. The website is a little bit difficult to use, but last week I managed to download all of the data from two of the cameras — a total of 35 Gigabytes of data! — and I’ve spent the subsequent week figuring out what’s there and how to handle it.

So, space fans, without further ado, here, for the first time in a format easily accessible to the public, are hundreds and hundreds of science-quality images from the Chang’e 3 lander and Yutu rover. I don’t usually host entire data sets (PDS-formatted and all) but I made an exception in this case because the Chinese website is a bit challenging to use.

The image above is a cropped version of Yutu, taken by the lander. Be sure and go to the link to see the full image as well as others.

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Curiosity moves on, scoop still not working

10:10 am

Curiosity’s science team has finished its work at Namib Dune and has decided to move on, even though they are still analyzing an unspecified issue with the rover’s scoop instrument.

So far, in the week since they first had a problem while sifting sand from the dune, they have not described in any way what the problem is. All they have said is this:

Unfortunately, the CHIMRA behaved in an unexpected way during processing of the third scoop on Sol 1231, which prevented completion of the arm activities planned for last weekend.

The robot arm functions, and they used it yesterday to get some extreme close-ups of the sand, but it appears they cannot use the scoop at this time.

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A look inside Comet 67P/C-G

9:53 am

The Rosetta science team has determined that Comet 67P/C-G has no voids or large caverns in its interior, and that its low density is because its dust and water ice have mixed to produce a “fluffy” density.

In a new study, published in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, a team led by Martin Pätzold, from Rheinische Institut für Umweltforschung an der Universität zu Köln, Germany, have shown that Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is also a low-density object, but they have also been able to rule out a cavernous interior. This result is consistent with earlier results from Rosetta’s CONSERT radar experiment showing that the double-lobed comet’s ‘head’ is fairly homogenous on spatial scales of a few tens of metres.

The most reasonable explanation then is that the comet’s porosity must be an intrinsic property of dust particles mixed with the ice that make up the interior. In fact, earlier spacecraft measurements had shown that comet dust is typically not a compacted solid, but rather a ‘fluffy’ aggregate, giving the dust particles high porosity and low density, and Rosetta’s COSIMA and GIADA instruments have shown that the same kinds of dust grains are also found at 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

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Falcon 9 to be modified

9:44 am

The competition heats up: SpaceX is modifying its Falcon 9 rocket based on engine tests it performed on the December 22 returned first stage.

SpaceX will be making modifications to its Falcon 9 rocket based on what the company learned from re-igniting the engines on the vehicle it landed. That’s according to SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell, who spoke about the state of the company today at the Commercial Space Transportation Conference in Wasington, DC. Shotwell didn’t specify what those modifications will be, but said the changes will make the vehicle “even more robust” for its ascent into space.

This report helps explain why SpaceX has pushed back all planned launches of the upgraded Falcon 9 rocket. Their tests of the returned first stage revealed issues that they think are important enough to be addressed before another rocket is launched, and they are proceeding to deal with those issues.

It also illustrates an enormous advantage they have over every other rocket company that has ever existed in the past. They, unlike all past rocket companies, actually have a used first stage that they can study to see the real consequences of launch and landing. All previous estimates of those consequences were only based on computer models and speculation.

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February 2, 2016 Batchelor podcast

10:48 pm

Below the fold is Tuesday’s podcast of my appearance on the John Batchelor show. In addition to discussing Falcon Heavy, Ariane 6, and the question of rocket re-usability, I also lambasted the glacially slow pace of NASA’s Orion project, producing four capsules for a mere $17 billion in only 19 years! And speaking of glaciers, I also noted in the science segment the stonewalling at NOAA that prevents scientists from analyzing the rational behind their “adjustments” to their climate data, all of which cool the past and warm the present.
» Read more

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Carter would pick Trump if he had no other choice

4:26 pm

Heh: When asked by a reporter about the Presidential campaign, former President Jimmy Carter said he’d pick Donald Trump over Ted Cruz if they were his only choices. And why would he do that?

If he had to choose between Cruz and Trump for the Republican nomination, Carter chuckled, “I think I would choose Trump, which may surprise some of you.” (It did, judging by the loud laughter from the audience.)

“The reason is, Trump has proven already he’s completely malleable,” Carter explained. [emphasis mine]

I think this might one of those very rare moments when Jimmy Carter has correctly analyzed the situation.

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Luxembourg to establish space property rights

10:34 am

The competition heats up: The government of Luxembourg today announced an initiative to establish a legal framework that will ensure property rights in space for private investors.

The Luxembourg Government announced a series of measures to position Luxembourg as a European hub in the exploration and use of space resources. Amongst the key steps undertaken, as part of the spaceresources.lu initiative, will be the development of a legal and regulatory framework confirming certainty about the future ownership of minerals extracted in space from Near Earth Objects (NEO’s) such as asteroids.

Luxembourg is the first European country to announce its intention to set out a formal legal framework which ensures that private operators working in space can be confident about their rights to the resources they extract, i.e. rare minerals from asteroids. Such a legal framework will be worked out in full consideration of international law. Luxembourg is eager to engage with other countries on this matter within a multilateral framework.

The announcement is a bit vague about what exactly Luxembourg really plans to do. For example, it is unclear if this framework will only apply to Luxembourg citizens, or will be used to bring the private efforts from other countries to Luxembourg (the more likely scenario). It also does not tell us how the initiative will deal with the UN Outer Space Treaty, which essentially outlaws countries from establishing their own legal framework in space. Individuals can supposedly own private property in space under that treaty, but no country can claim territory or impose its own legal framework on any territory, thus making any private property claims unclear and weak.

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