Today’s blacklisted American: Woman denied kidney transplant in Colorado because she is unvaccinated

1:10 pm

The unvaccinated denied healthcare in Colorado
No healthcare in Colorado permitted for the unvaccinated. Let them die!

Persecution is now cool! A woman who has stage 5 renal failure was suddenly told by UCHealth (University of Colorado Health) — just before her kidney transplant operation — that she was banned from the hospital because both she and her donor are unvaccinated.

“Here I am, willing to be a direct donor to her. It does not affect any other patient on the transplant list,” Jaimee Fougner, Leilani Lutali’s kidney donor, told CBS4. “How can I sit here and allow them to murder my friend when I’ve got a perfectly good kidney and can save her life?”

Lutali said she received a letter from Colorado health system UCHealth at the end of September explaining that she and Fougner have 30 days to begin the vaccine process. They would be removed from the kidney transplant list if they refuse the shots. “I said I’ll sign a medical waiver. I have to sign a waiver anyway for the transplant itself, releasing them from anything that could possibly go wrong,” said Lutali. “It’s surgery, it’s invasive. I sign a waiver for my life. I’m not sure why I can’t sign a waiver for the COVID shot.”

According the article, when they first scheduled the surgery in August they were told by the hospital that being unvaccinated was not a problem. This changed suddenly in late September, at the last moment.
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The wavy and beautiful edge of the northern ice cap of Mars

12:32 pm

The scarp of the north pole icecap on Mars
Click for full image.

Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on August 7, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows the many layered scarp that forms the edge of the northern polar ice cap on Mars, probably more than 2,000 feet high.

Those layers are significant, as they indicate the many climate cycles that scientists think Mars has undergone over the eons as the red planet’s rotational tilt, or obliquity, rocked back and forth from 11 degrees inclination to as much as 60 degrees. At the extremes, the ice cap was either growing or shrinking, while today (at 25 degrees inclination) it appears to be in a steady state.

Why the layers alternate light and dark is not known. The shift from lighter colors at the top half and the dark bottom half marks the separation between the top water ice cap and what scientists label the basal unit. It also marks some major change in Mars’ climate and geology that occurred about 4.5 million years ago.
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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. If you buy it from 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

Military satellite imagery to be obtained from competitive commercial market

9:18 am

Capitalism in space: The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is shifting how it gets the government’s military satellite surveillance imagery so that instead of having a long term contract with one company, multiple satellite companies will compete to provide the data.

Under this new imagery procurement, the NRO plans to buy products from multiple vendors and move beyond the current single-supplier arrangement that the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency signed more than a decade ago with DigitalGlobe, which is now Maxar Technologies. The NGA in 2017 turned over responsibilities for commercial imagery procurement to the NRO, while the NGA remains the primary buyer of commercial geospatial data analytics.

The NRO is expected to select at least three U.S. suppliers and structure the program with onramps for new providers. The agency also will require vendors to sign “end user license agreements” so imagery can be shared across government agencies without additional licensing fees.

This change illustrates how other government agencies are following NASA’s lead and shifting from controlling everything to buying the needed product from the open market. While NRO was getting imagery before from a commercial company, Maxar, depending on a single vendor limited competition and innovation while raising costs.

Buying the data from multiple companies means that NRO will get more choice for less cost.

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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.

Today’s blacklisted American: Football scout fired for refusing to get vaccinated

12:45 pm

Coming to your town in America soon!
Death camps are coming for the unclean unvaccinated.

They’re coming for you next: The Atlanta Falcons football team has fired one its scouts, Rodrik David, simply because he, like many others, had decided that it made more sense for him to not get vaccinated against COVID.

The owner of the company had issued a policy requiring all employees, both full- and part-time, to be vaccinated. David refused, for reasons that were his own.

As noted at this report, David was good at his job, and had been working for the Falcons for the past five years.

This is his fifth season with the Falcons and his second as an area scout. He joined the club as a scouting intern during training camp, prior to the 2015 season, and was hired as a scouting assistant in February of 2016. He was promoted to pro scout prior to the 2017 season.

David was a riser.

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Sunspot update: The boom in sunspots returns!

12:11 pm

It is time for my monthly sunspot update, based on the most recent NOAA monthly graph, showing the changes in the Sun’s sunspot activity during September. That graph is below, annotated to show the previous solar cycle predictions and thus provide context.

In September sunspot activity boomed once again, producing the most sunspots in a month since 2016 and ending the slight drop in activity in August to return to the pattern the Sun has exhibited since the end of solar minimum. Consistently the number of sunspots on the visible hemisphere of the Sun since 2020 has exceeded the April 2020 prediction of the NOAA scientist panel, as indicated by the red curve in the graph.

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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

2018 review by Blue Origin suggested changes that were not adopted

10:52 am

Capitalism in space: Shortly after Bob Smith took over as CEO of Blue Origin he hired a consulting firm to review the company’s corporate culture and management policies, then had a top management briefing to review what that analysis had found.

Notes from that meeting by Blue Origin’s management have now become available, and suggest that the company’s management recognized it needed to make some changes in how it operated in order to better compete with SpaceX. Blue Origin had become hidebound, timid, and structured in a manner that made the creation of cost-effective engineering difficult. For example,

“Traditionally Blue team has not been focused on producibility and cost when designing,” another executive commented.

In response to the Avascent’s report on SpaceX’s cost focus, Blue Origin officials also acknowledged that they did not have an effective means of estimating costs before beginning a project. “Blue is riddled with poor estimating,” one executive wrote, specifically citing the New Glenn rocket. “The estimates barely cover the spot cost buy of that material based on market price, let alone the entire part material purchase. How did SpaceX keep to their target cost? They probably did a good job estimating. How they accomplished such good estimating is beyond me right now, but they did it somehow for their early years.” [emphasis mine]

As noted at the link, however, there is no evidence the company every made any of the suggested changes:

Whatever Bob Smith hoped to glean from the Avascent study, it’s not clear that the work has had a salutary effect on Blue Origin’s culture.

In the nearly three years since the report’s completion, SpaceX has gone on to launch more than 60 rockets, including four human missions, into orbit. SpaceX also has leaped ahead on a number of other fronts, including winning a multi-billion contract from NASA to build a Human Landing System for the Artemis Moon Program.

Blue Origin, by contrast, has succeeded in launching a single human flight on its New Shepard system—carrying Bezos into space for a few minutes in July. The company’s first orbital flight likely remains about three years away. Far from embracing openness, it remains more opaque than ever. And there are emerging questions about the company’s culture.

I would be more blunt. Prior to Bob Smith’s arrival in 2017 Blue Origin’s management style appeared somewhat similar to SpaceX’s, with regular almost monthly test flights of New Shepard. After he arrived everything slowed down, with the management style becoming all the things the 2018 Avascent study found wrong. And in the three years since that report and management meeting, it appears Smith did nothing to change anything. Blue Origin appears to remain a hidebound company going nowhere.

The company has vast resources due to the cash that Jeff Bezos has poured into it. It needs some good courageous leadership however. The main question will be whether Bezos can provide that.

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Due to cracks, Russia will no longer use Zvezda’s docking port

9:39 am

Russian officials today revealed that they will no longer use the docking port on its Zvezda module on ISS because of the stress fracture cracks they have found in the section where that port is located.

Russia is unable to use one of the docking ports of the ISS to its full extent due to cracks in the transitional chamber of the Zvezda module, the general designer of Russia’s Energia corporation, associate member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Vladimir Solovyov said on Monday. “The transitional chamber’s loss of airtightness is often mentioned these days. We are very fortunate the cracks are at the end. We shut down that compartment, thus losing one docking port, which narrows our opportunities somewhat. The crack is very insignificant, though,”

In other words, they have sealed the aft section of Zvezda to reduce further air leaks, thus also closing off access to the port.

The Russian portion of ISS presently has two docking ports on two different modules. When Roscosmos launches its Prichal docking hub in November, to be attached to Nauka’s port, they will then add four more ports.

This decision underlines the impending end to ISS’s life span. Zvezda is not the only old Russian module on ISS where stress fractures have been found. “In August they found cracks in the module Zarya, the oldest module on ISS.

Though the U.S. part of ISS shows no such problem, it is designed to rely on the Russian half for its operations. If Russia must shut down its modules then the station will not be able to function for much longer.

The U.S. will likely overcome some of these issues with the planned launch in ’24 of Axiom’s private commercial module to ISS, which will eventually evolve into an complete space station separate from ISS. For the Russians the pressure to design and launch their own new station has become more critical. Whether they can do it however is unknown. Russia has not built a new space station module in decades. Their new ISS module, Nauka, was built in the 1990s.

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Space Force payload problems force delay until ’22 of next Falcon Heavy launch

9:18 am

Capitalism in space: The Space Force has announced that because more time is needed to prepare its military payload, the next Falcon Heavy launch, scheduled later this month, will be delayed until ’22.

This is not the first time payload issues have delayed the launch, which had been previously scheduled for July. The Space Force has not announced a new launch date, nor was it very specific in describing the issues that has forced this delay.

As for the Falcon Heavy, though there has been a long delay since its last flight in June 2019, it appears that SpaceX has four launches scheduled for ’22, with another six already contracted and scheduled for later.

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Russia imposes new restrictions on any reporting of Roscosmos

9:08 am

According to this report of today’s launch by Russia of a movie crew to ISS, Putin’s government has just passed new restrictions on reporting of its space effort by Russian citizens, either in or out of Russia.

The new regulations, which took effect on September 29, 2021, essentially prohibit Russians from reporting on the Russian space program outside of Russia. Violators of these regulations will be classified as “foreign agents” — which would create numerous legal issues for Russian citizens.

Specifically, the new regulations target the field of military and technical activities that are not related to or connected in any way with state secrets but which, with vague language, “can be used against Russia.” Most of the activities on the newly released list by the FSB specifically focus on Roscosmos. Prohibited topics of reporting regarding Roscosmos now include information on investigations conducted by the agency, the organization’s financials, condition of rockets and ground support equipment, development plans for Roscosmos vehicles, Roscosmos’ cooperation with other nations for space activities, and new technologies.

These rules essentially forbid Russian citizens from publishing almost anything that Roscosmos itself does not publish. If they do so without permission from outside the country, returning to Russia will become very problematic.

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UAE to launch probe to asteroid belt

9:01 am

The new colonial movement: The United Arab Emirates (UAE) today announced that it is planning an unmanned probe to visit a number of asteroids in the asteroid belt.

The project targets a 2028 launch with a landing in 2033, a five-year journey in which the spacecraft will travel some 3.6 billion kilometers (2.2 billion miles). The spacecraft would need to slingshot first around Venus and then the Earth to gather enough speed to reach an asteroid some 560 million kilometers (350 million miles) away.

It appears they have not yet chosen their targets in the belt.

The big question will be how much of this project will be built in the UAE, and how much they will have to farm out to others. For their Al-Amal Mars orbiter, the satellite was mostly built by U.S. universities, as they trained UAE engineers, who now run the mission entire.

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Russia launches movie director and actor to ISS

8:40 am

Capitalism in space: Early today Russia successfully used its Soyuz-2 rocket and Soyuz capsule to launch a movie crew to ISS to begin a twelve day visit where they will film scenes for a science fiction movie.

An actress Yulia Peresild and a movie director Klim Shipenko arrived at the International Space Station aboard the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft on Oct. 5, 2021, for a 12-day visit to shoot scenes of a sci-fi drama. They were accompanied by a professional cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, who had to switch to manual control during the final approach to the station due to a failure of the Kurs automated rendezvous system aboard Soyuz. Shkaplerov will remain aboard the station for nearly six months.

This is the second in a steady string of passenger commercial spaceflights that have been purchased by various people from either Roscosmos in Russia or SpaceX in the U.S. We shall see two more such flights in December, and another early in ’22, with additional flights to be scheduled beyond that. The full list, at this time:

  • September 15, 2021: SpaceX’s Dragon capsule flew four private citizens on a three day orbital flight
  • October 2021: The Russians launch two passengers to ISS for 12 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/February 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.

Expect this list to grow. There appears to be plenty of demand for such commercial manned spaceflights, and with more flights and more competition (once Boeing’s Starliner enters the game) the cost will certainly drop.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

34 China
23 SpaceX
16 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman

With this launch Russia has now exceeded the number of launches it completed last year. If they complete all their presently scheduled launches for ’21, Roscosmos will have its best year since 2015.

The U.S still leads China 35 to 34 in the national rankings.

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