August 25, 2021 Zimmerman/Batchelor podcast
Embedded below the fold in two parts.
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James Brown & Charlie Daniels – Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag/I Got You (I Feel Good)
An evening pause: Performed live 1983.
Hat tip Gary.
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
Today’s blacklisted American gets an apology from Illinois regulators for threatening his medical license for opinions they didn’t like
Today’s blacklist story is actually an update from my blacklist story two days ago about Dr. Jeremy Heinrichs, who because he had publicly expressed strong skepticism about the mask mandates being imposed by his state government in Illinois, had been threatened with the loss of his medical license by state regulators.
It appears those regulators have now quickly apologized for getting caught acting like jack-booted thugs.
“The initial response to your inquiry requested information that the Department does not need,” Dina Martin, an attorney with the Illinois Department of Professional and Financial Regulation, said in a letter to Henrichs’ legal counsel. The department had originally asked for “a detailed statement on your opinion about masks, and whether you support and will enforce a mask mandate based on your elected position as a school board member.”
“I sincerely apologize for the tone and content of those communications,” Martin said in her August 19 letter, obtained by Just the News.
It also appears that the regulators plan to drop their complaint investigation.
This is how you treat bullies. You don’t back down. You don’t apologize. And you certainly don’t hide in shame out of fear their unjustified attacks will hurt you. No, you fight back hard, and brightly expose them for all to see. Like all bullies they will immediately back off themselves, especially if their attack has no merit (which is almost always the case).
There is no indication however that the regulators who sent those improper initial communications have been punished in any way. I expect not. The Illinois government got caught this time, but has no intention of preventing this from happening in the future. If anything I expect the government has simply asked these employees to lay low for awhile and try the same thing again later, in the hope that others will be more easily intimidated.
To really fix this the voters need to fire everyone in these governments, from the Democratic Party elected officials who control Illinois to the lowest bureaucrat who thinks such behavior can sometimes be justified.
Perseverance’s upcoming targets: sand ripples, rocks, and a lot of dust
Cool image time! The photo to the right was one of ten color images taken by Ingenuity on its twelfth flight on August 15, 2021. This photo is one of two images looking the same area from slightly different positions in order to create a stereoscopic view, with the other image found here.
The ground the helicopter was scouting, dubbed South Seitah, is an area that the Perseverance team hopes to send the rover. Ingenuity’s images from this flight will not only tell them whether the terrain is safe to traverse, it will allow them to map out a route that will avoid problems while effectively targeting the most interesting rocks.
The photo shows a lot of Martian dust, with a good portion forming small sand dune ripples. The rocks appear to be bedrock pavement stones, which because these are on the floor of the crater and the lowest elevation, likely hold the oldest geology that Perseverance will see on its journey in Jezero Crater. For this reason the science team is spending a lot of time studying that floor, and will make probably several drilling attempts to obtain samples.
The terrain in general looks entirely safe for the rover to travel. I expect the science team will thus continue north, crossing to North Seitah, rather than backtrack and travel over already traversed ground. Initially they had decided to avoid this ground because they feared it might be too rough for the rover. I suspect they were just being overly cautious at the start of the mission, and will now work past that fear.
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.
Musk’s Boring Co offers to dig tunnel for resident transportation during launch closures
Capitalism in space: Elon Musk’s Boring Company has proposed digging a tunnel so that people can still access Boca Chica’s beaches even during periods when SpaceX is doing launch operations and needs to close the surface roads.
The Boring Company (TBC) met with Cameron County officials to discuss the possibility of a tunnel project running from South Padre Island (SPI) to Boca Chica Beach.
The Boring Company pitched the idea of an SPI-Boca Chica tunnel to Cameron County administrator Pete Sepulveda Jr. and county engineer Benjamin Worsham early this summer. Cameron County officials have been thinking of giving people access to part of Boca Chica Beach even during closures.
The county has said it likely cannot afford to pay for such a thing, but Musk’s company is still proposing to do an in-depth study to find out what will be necessary to make it happen.
It could very well be that Musk might find some cash to help pay for this himself. The public relations would be excellent, and it would I think be the right thing to do. It is also possible that the local communities will have more cash themselves because of the booming economy SpaceX is bringing them.
Blue Origin BE-4 engine delayed again
In an interview ULA’s CEO Tory Bruno revealed that Blue Origin is not going to deliver the first two flightworthy BE-4 engines this summer, as promised, with delivery now probably not until the end of the year.
“I will not get them before the end of the year,” said Tory Bruno, CEO of ULA, in an exclusive Denver Business Journal interview ahead of this week’s Space Symposium industry gathering in Colorado Springs. “It will be shortly into the beginning of the 2022 calendar year, and anywhere in there will support me being able to build up a rocket and have that Vulcan waiting on my customer, Astrobotic.”
…“We’ve actually be been able to accommodate this, but I’ll be straight with you, the dates we’ve set up for them now— we really don’t have the ability to make any big moves after this,” Bruno said. “I need them to diligently work through the plans we have and get done on time.”
ULA needs to launch its new Vulcan rocket twice in order to get approved for its first military launch, now expected in less than 12 months. They thus no longer have any schedule margin.
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
Caroline Jones – Rise (Sing It Loud)
An evening pause: Sorry this got posted late tonight, but better late then never.
Hat tip Dan Morris.
China completes two launches
China today successfully completed two launches, using from different spaceports its Long March 2C and Long March 3B rockets.
The 2C launched a two demo internet communications satellites designed to eventually be used in a large constellation similar to the constellations of SpaceX and OneWeb. The launch also included a third unidentified communications satellite.
The 3B placed in orbit what is believed to be a military reconnaissance satellite.
Both rockets dumped their first stages somewhere in the interior of China. No word on whether those stages carried parachutes or grid fins to better control their landing, or crashed near habitable regions.
The leaders in the 2021 launch race:
29 China
20 SpaceX
13 Russia
4 Northrop Grumman
The U.S. still leads China 31 to 29 in the national rankings.
Today’s blacklisted American: A man’s life destroyed because he visited the Capitol on January 6th
Show trials: The Biden administration’s goal for pro-Trump protesters
Genocide is coming: Because the Biden Justice Department is determined to throw the book at him, the life of truck driver Robert Reeder has been thoroughly shattered, losing his job and friends and even alienating his family, simply because he decided to participate in the protests at the Capitol on January 6th and got caught up in the chaos that ensued.
All the evidence suggests that Reeder, along with almost all the protesters on January 6th, did nothing particularly violent. Their actions were spontaneous (as an FBI investigation has reluctantly admitted), and mostly peaceful. Moreover, Reeder’s behavior, along with his fellow pro-Trump protesters, pales in comparison to the violence and rioting committed routinely by leftist protests from Antifa and BLM, for which they are never charged or punished.
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Wind-blown dark material on Mars
Click for full image.
Cool image time! The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, was taken on May 13, 2021 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). It shows a cluster of small depressions from which has blown dark material across the ground to the south. The full image also shows two craters north and south of this cluster that have similar dark material blown from their interiors.
When I first looked at this image, I wondered if the dark material and these depressions signaled a recently active volcanic vent where magma had spewed upward to stain the nearby ground. See for example this recent post about what some scientists believe might the most recent volcanic event so far found on Mars. I emailed several scientists for their thoughts, all of whom said this appears to not be active volcanism but merely windblown dark material.
Kim Seelos, science operations lead for MRO’s visible-near infrared spectrometer, put it simply. “My own reading of this image is that the dark areas here are likely akin to wind streaks.” Instead of the dark material being thrown from the depressions by a volcanic event, it was swept to the south by the prevailing winds.
How that dark material got into the depressions, and why it was so comparably darker than the surrounding terrain, remains unclear. David Horvath of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona speculated that the low hills just north of the dark patch might be a factor.
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First hi-res radio wavelength images of metal asteroid Psyche
Using the ALMA telescope in Chile astronomers have obtained the highest resolution radio images of the surface of the metal-rich asteroid Psyche yet obtained. The image to the right is from their just published paper. From the article:
These new images reveal that some regions of the asteroid have surface temperatures different from the average, indicating that Psyche’s composition is not uniform. The researchers also found that Psyche has a relatively high thermal inertia compared to other asteroids, yet it radiates approximately 60% less heat than would be expected for an object with such a high inertia. The researchers hypothesize that this is because the asteroid’s surface is at least 30% metal. However, the light reflecting off Psyche’s surface is unpolarized, which would not be the case for an object with a smooth or solid metallic surface. They therefore hypothesize that metallic grains are spread throughout its surface material, causing the light to scatter.
Though Psyche is large, 178 by 144 by 101 miles, it is not spherical like Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt at 580 miles diameter. Thus, somewhere from the size of Psyche to the size of Ceres we move from an irregular asteroid body to a spherical planetary body, as it appears most planetary scientists define planets.
The probe Psyche is scheduled to launch in August ’22 to arrive at Psyche in ’26.
ISS spacewalk postponed due to “minor medical issue”
NASA announced yesterday that a spacewalk planned for today on ISS has been postponed because of ” a minor medical issue” involving American astronaut Mark Vande Hei.
This issue is not a medical emergency. The spacewalk is not time-sensitive and crew members are continuing to move forward with other station work and activities. Teams are assessing the next available opportunity to conduct the spacewalk following the SpaceX CRS-23 cargo resupply launch planned for Aug. 28 and upcoming Russian spacewalks.
The NASA announcement provided no other information, which is unfortunate. While Vande Hei’s medical privacy must be respected, his decision to not disclose the issue will only fuel some foolish speculation that is likely false. It is always better to be transparent.
Update: It appears the medical issue was a pinched nerve, which will likely cause the spacewalk to be delayed into September at the soonest.