Tag: bankruptcy

SpaceX engineers given task to review FAA air traffic operations

9:14 am

On February 16, 2025 the new head of the Department of Transportation revealed that he had invited SpaceX to review its air traffic control operations in Virginia and make recommendations.

Tomorrow, members of @elonmusk’s SpaceX team will be visiting the Air Traffic Control System Command Center in VA to get a firsthand look at the current system, learn what air traffic controllers like and dislike about their current tools, and envision how we can make a new, better, modern and safer system.

Because I know the media (and Hillary Clinton) will claim Elon’s team is getting special access, let me make clear that the @FAANews regularly gives tours of the command center to both media and companies.

Many propaganda news reports immediately did exactly what Duffy predicted, quickly finding people to attack both Musk and Duffy for this action and giving them a bull horn for those attacks:

That prompted criticism from some aviation professionals. “SpaceX put people in danger yesterday and their for-profit corporation should reimburse every other for-profit corporation that had to divert, change course or delay because of their operations in the national airspace system,” wrote Steve Jangelis, aviation safety chair for the Air Line Pilots Association, in a social media post after the incident.

Like many in the propaganda press, this article made a big deal about the debris that fell in the Caribbean during the January Starship/Superheavy test flight when Starship broke up soon after stage separation. It however buried this fact to the very end of the article:

In the case if January’s launch, Diez said SpaceX coordinated “debris response areas” with ATO [the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization] beforehand, as it had done on past flights, but this was the first time the areas were activated. “It was only a matter of minutes from when it was activated to when airspace began to be cleared,” she said, sufficient given the time it would take for debris to fall into the airspace. The airspace was cleared in about 15 minutes, she added.

Those debris response areas are developed in coordination with the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation, or AST, said Katie Cranor, acting deputy director of AST’s office of operational safety, on the same panel. After the mishap, she said “only certain sections of the debris response areas were activated to allow traffic to still move freely.”

To put it more bluntly, SpaceX did the proper due diligence before launch — anticipating the possibility of such a failure — and worked well with the FAA to prepare for it. These facts have been conveniently left out of all the reports on that January launch, and we should at least give kudos to this article for finally mentioning it, albeit reluctantly.

Nonetheless, the insane hostile reaction to this invitation for help by the Transportation Department illustrates once again the stupidity of the left. In every case they attack blindly and without any thought at all, hoping such attacks will win them support and hurt their opponents. Instead, it simply makes them look petty and stupid, and is likely convincing their moderate supporters to rethink that support.

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With CBS helping him, under no condition should Trump settle his $10 billion lawsuit against the network

4:37 pm

Lying lefist propaganda, through and through
Lying lefist propaganda, through and through

Don’t settle! In the fall Donald Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against CBS News, alleging the network interfered with the election by maliciously editing a 60 Minutes interview with vice president Kamala Harris to hide and improve her incoherent word salad answers, and it did so to aid her just days before the election. In February, when the actual transcripts of the interview were released, proving CBS’s misconduct, Trump expanded the lawsuit to include CBS News’s parent company, Paramount Global, which streamed the program.

Though some might argue the lawsuit rests on weak legal grounds, it seems that Trump’s complaint has some merit, especially since the leftist bias of the older alphabet news outlets (CBS, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, PBS) has become so obvious in the past decade. These networks no longer even try to report the news fairly or with any accuracy. Instead, they twist every story to either promote the Democratic Party or slander the Republican Party.

That bias has caused these networks a lot of trouble in the courts in recent years, when others have sued them for defamation and slander. » Read more

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British rocket startup Skyrora targets ’26 for its first orbital test flight

10:06 am

According to an article yesterday in the British media, the British rocket startup Skyrora is now hoping to do the first orbital test flight of its XL smallsat rocket in 2026, launching from the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands.

The company applied for this launch license with the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) more than a year ago, but still waits an approval. Previously the company had completed in Iceland several successful suborbital test launches in 2018 and 2020, with a last test in 2022 ending in failure.

The company has been around a long time, with relatively little progress. Whether its schedule is realistic remains unknown, and is more questionable because it is burdened by the CAA’s red tape.

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Texas commission rejects anti-SpaceX calls to deny company its Starship deluge water permit

2:27 pm

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality this week strongly and finally dismissed the repeated demands by various fringe activist groups to shut down SpaceX’s launch operations at Boca Chica and the use of the deluge system designed to protect the launchpad and the Superheavy booster.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality on Thursday denied requests from a dozen area residents and several groups to reconsider the commercial space company’s permit to dump as much as 358,000 gallons of water into wetlands during tests and launches of its Starship rocket from its Starbase east of Brownsville.

Commission Chair Brooke Paup introduced the item as “quite a big deal,” then quickly moved to deny additional hearings on the subject and issue the permit. She said concerns raised by individuals and groups including Save RGV, the South Texas Environmental Justice Network and the Carrizo/Comecrudo Nation of Texas failed to identify “new factual information or an error that would alter the executive director’s decision.

“The hearing requesters did not show that their ability to practice their religion or engage in recreational activities will be affected in a manner different than the general public,” Paup said.

The commission admitted in its ruling that there had been numerous technical errors by both the commission and SpaceX when it initially approved the permit, but none of those errors were significant.

It appears this particular effort by a very tiny minority of leftist anti-Musk activists has finally been shut down. We can only hope that these groups will now fade away, not because they want to give up but because their funding could be gone. I suspect their money came from somewhere within the fraudulent grant programs at EPA and other federal agencies that DOGE has now identified and shut down.

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Astronomers demand more regulations to prevent industry from ruining the Moon’s “environment”

9:33 am

According to two articles yesterday in the British press (here and here), both quoting extensively one astronomer, if strong regulation and control (given to them of course) isn’t imposed immediately, the space tourism of billionaires is going to ruin the Moon’s pristine environment, which on its far side is especially perfect for radio astronomy. From the first link:

“There’s a rush of companies and states who might want to get in on the act on the moon,” said [astronomer Martin Elvis, who added that there were also other concerns. “There’s a desire there from the billionaire class, ‘Oh I would love to spend a week on the moon’. And you don’t need many billionaires to start adding up. If they go without coordination, then it’s a mess. We could well lose these unique opportunities to do science on a scale that we couldn’t possibly imagine.”

One of the most exciting possibilities is the use of the far side of the moon for radio astronomy. As all signals from the Earth are blocked, telescopes would, Elvis said, have the sensitivity to see into the so called “dark age” of the universe, after the big bang but before stars had formed.

Elvis is based at Harvard and also co-chairs a working group at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) that wants astronomers to be given full legal control of the Moon, preventing anyone from building anything without their permission so they can instead build their telescopes there instead.

The problem is that the astronomical community has so far shown little interest in building telescopes in space. It has instead focused on building giant Earth-based telescopes while trying to get governments to restrict the launch of satellite constellations that might interfere with those telescopes. Now it wishes to restrict lunar development as well.

Elvis however admits “It’s a sort of first come, first served situation, which encourages people to rush in and do things without thinking too hard.” Let me translate: Everyone else is beating us to the Moon because we haven’t been interested in going, so now that we might be interested we want governments to shut down our competition.

It is long past time for astronomers and the IAU to stop trying to use government to squelch everyone else and get in the game. Initiate the building of telescopes both in space and the Moon. Not only are these better places to build telescopes than on Earth, it will give astronomers some credibility when they ask others to give them their own space.

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The movement to ban smartphones in schools widens

1:39 pm

The smart phone: Bad for kids
The smart phone: Proven very bad for kids

According to a detailed Washington Examiner story earlier this week, the campaign to ban smartphones in schools is expanding rapidly, with widespread bi-partisan support, backed up by studies and school reports that consistently show significant improvements in student behavior and learning when smart phones are banned.

Eight states have banned cellphone use in schools, with Florida being the first to do so when Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill into law in 2023. The legislation in the Sunshine State allows teachers to ban cellphone use during classroom instruction and authorizes them to hold a student’s phone if it becomes a distraction.

Florida was followed by Indiana, Louisiana, Virginia, California, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Ohio in passing similar bans that have either been enacted or will be in the coming year. Each of the states that have passed bans has taken different approaches to implementing the policy.

Fifteen other states have proposed a ban, and an additional eight states are either doing test bans in selected regions or have issued recommendations endorsing bans. That makes for a total if 32 states out of 50 that are working to keep smart phones away from kids when they are in school.

The best aspect of this is the generally bi-partisan nature of the movement. While most of the initial action occurred in red states controlled by conservative politicians, blue states like California and Minnesota have also joined in. A Minnesota middle school for example was an early practitioner of the ban in 2023, finding it not only improved classroom participation, but the entire social atmosphere in the school improved. In California meanwhile Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom signed a law restricting smartphone that takes effect in July 2026. Even Washington, D.C. is debating legislation to institute a school ban.

The sooner the better. Kids don’t need smart phones. All they really need is a dumb phone to call their parents in case of an emergency. And when they are in school this is even less necessary. Spending their time staring at a screen is the worst way to learn to live with other humans, a learning experience that is probably their number one class assignment.

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Another Democrat demonstrates her stupidity and ignorance, demanding NASA’s acting administrator revoke Musk’s access to headquarters

9:57 am

Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York)
Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York), describing
her terror when ordinary Americans walked through the
Capitol on January 6th, almost all of whom simply took
pictures. Click for video.

Proving she knows nothing about the Constitution and the powers it gives to the President, congresswoman Grace Meng (D-New York) earlier this week sent a letter to NASA’s acting administrator Janet Petro demanding that Petro revoke any access to the agency’s headquarters by Elon Musk as part of his work auditing government operations as part of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

Meng’s letter [pdf] is quite entertaining, especially because it repeats the new Democratic Party talking point that somehow because DOGE employees, including Musk, were “unelected” their access is inappropriate. How stupid. Except for the president, everyone who works in the executive branch of government is “unelected.”

That Meng also thinks NASA’s acting administrator has the power to block access to someone hired specifically by the president to do this work shows us how ignorant she is of the Constitution and basic law. Petro can’t cancel Trump’s orders, even if she wants to. Trump is her boss, and if he tasks Musk and DOGE to audit NASA’s books, she must comply.

There is only one part of Meng’s demand that makes some sense, where she demands Petro “set clear and public ground rules” to keep Musk from getting access to proprietary information of other space companies. Musk certainly has a conflict-of-interest issue at NASA, and such rules make sense. I am also quite sure that Musk is well aware of this issue, and will purposely leave the DOGE audit to others.

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Modern academia: “We aren’t going to hire another white guy, are we?”

1:52 pm

Whites need not apply
Whites need not apply.

The quote in the headline above comes from a lawsuit [pdf] filed by a former professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, Stephen Kleinschmit, who was eventually terminated because he had raised concerns within his department about its hiring practices, which beginning in 2019 became entirely focused on choosing its new faculty employees solely on whether they were born to the correct race, not on their talents or qualifications.

Kleinschmit raised his concerns because he was required to participate in the hiring process, and feared if he did not do so it “would make him a participant in illegal activities for which he would be held liable.” Instead of recognizing the clearly discriminatory and illegal nature of its racial hiring practices, however, the department decided to terminate Kleinshcmit’s contract instead.

He was ultimately terminated in August 2023 spring semester, ostensibly as a result of the need for “budget cuts.” Kleinschmit said the decision to fire him at that time appeared to be intentional, to not only cut him loose from his job at UIC, but also deny him the opportunity to seek employment at another university for more than a year.

However, Kleinschmit said he – the department’s only white male faculty member – was the only faculty member terminated at that time, despite claims of lack of finances, even as UIC moved forward with plans to hire more “diverse” faculty.

The complaint noted that Kleinschmit’s old job was later posted as eligible for hiring. But now the job ad was written in a way to encourage non-white male applicants, “as UIC shifted resources to a new job focused on fulfilling its racially discriminatory goals.” [emphasis mine]

In other words, the department fired its only white professor in order to replace him with a minority.
» Read more

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Orbex scouts Saxaford in advance of first launch

9:25 am

Map of spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Spaceports surrounding the Norwegian Sea

Though no details have been released, a team from the British rocket startup Orbex has arrived at the Saxaford spaceport in the Shetland Islands to begin preparations for the company’s first launch there, now planned to occur before the end of this year.

Originally Orbex was going to do its launches from the United Kingdom’s other proposed spaceport in Sutherland on the northern coast of Scotland. It had obtained a 50-year-lease to build its own dedicated launch facility, had built its rocket manufacturing facility nearby, and had originally hoped to do the first test orbital launch of its Prime rocket in 2022.

Three years later the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) had still not issued Orbex or Sutherland the necessary launch licenses. Faced with bankruptcy if it didn’t launch soon, in December the company announced it was switching its first launch to Saxaford, where the CAA had completed spaceport licensing. It hoped the CAA would thus be able to give it a launch license quickly. We shall see.

Note that the news is slow today. As much as I want to post lots of stuff, I can’t if nothing of significance appears to be happening.

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Maybe the only way to reform academia is to shut it down and start over

2:37 pm

NC State: Maybe rotten to the core
NC State: Maybe it’s rotten to the core

Back in 2021, when I was reporting new blacklist stories every single day during the intolerant madness after the COVID panic and the death of George Floyd, I posted the blacklisting and attempted destruction of a tenured professor at North Carolina State University, merely because Stephen Porter had publicly questioned the wisdom and soundness of its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion policies.

Though administrators tried hard to push Porter out, he managed to survive, and is still teaching at NC State. Sadly however his attempt for justice failed, his lawsuit against this harassment and slander campaign eventually being dismissed by the courts.

Porter however decided he couldn’t simply close the book on the matter. For example, the leftist effort at NC State to silence all debate during this same time resulted in one university employee committing suicide. He couldn’t take the constant harassment, the doxxing of his home address, the vandalism at his home, and the slanders accusing him of being a racist and “white supremacist” wherever he went on campus, all based on no evidence at all.

Moreover, even though the board of governors of the North Carolina university system in 2023 established an “institutional neutrality” policy that forbid its colleges from requiring new students or faculty to endorse DEI or compel them to obey the pronoun demands of others, Porter kept finding NC State violating that policy, in word and deed.

He decided that he needed to fight back.
» Read more

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It won’t be Democratic Party stupidity that will give Republicans victories in ’26 and ’28

12:06 pm

Vultures eating carrion
Democrats in Washington

In the past few weeks there have been a number of very entertaining essays describing the insane inability of Democrats to learn anything from their defeats in the 2024 elections. From the second link:

The Democratic Party just can’t help itself. For its own psychological reasons, it can’t move beyond the “denial” stage of grief. Doing so would jeopardize the party’s sense of purpose, identity, and ego. Right now, the “patient” cannot heal itself because it won’t accept the diagnosis.

Instead, it rejects it: Trump is Hitler! Musk is Hitler! MAGA is Hitler! I’m the only one defending democracy!

A sane, rational actor would take a step back and consider his own role in losing three branches of government, a majority of statehouses, and two-thirds of the Supreme Court. And then they’d develop a better product.

Fortunately for the GOP, they’re just not ready for that level of introspection. Not yet. (And probably not until it’s forced upon them.)

And so, the losing losers of the Democratic Party continue to lose. They can’t even counterpunch effectively, because they overreact to every feint. They’re so ridiculously undisciplined, they’re chasing shadows, following the champ around the ring like a puppy dog — eating a buffet of rights, jabs, and uppercuts. [emphasis in original]

All true, but if conservatives think this stupidity on the left will win Republicans the mid-term elections in ’26 and the next presidential election in ’28, they are fooling themselves. » Read more

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More indications balloon company Space Perspective is about to go bankrupt

11:24 am

New details reported yesterday strongly suggest that the high altitude balloon company Space Perspective has been unable to find new investors and is on the verge of shutting.

In a February 5 email to stakeholders, Interim CEO Michael Savage provided the latest updates, shedding light on failed funding efforts, the company’s dire financial situation, and attempts to restructure its debt. The email also acknowledged the gravity of the challenges ahead, hinting at the possible closure of operations.

Savage’s email outlined efforts to secure funding, including meetings with investors Fortuna and Broadlight, both of whom ultimately declined to proceed. Savage explained that while there was initial interest, the company’s mounting debt and financial instability deterred further investment. “Both [investors] have expressed interest, but despite the current circumstances and since Nov./Dec. 2024, they feel that their LPs would not stomach the numbers,” Savage wrote.

The company has previously announced it was shifting operations out of the Cape Canaveral area to a location 90 miles north where costs were less as it searched for new investors. This new report suggests this move and the search have not worked and the company will soon go out of business.

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