Tag: bankruptcy

Pushback: Former police chief who illegally raided local Kansas newspaper charged

1:26 pm

Police Chief Gideon Cody, proud to emulate Nazi tactics
Former Marion police Chief Gideon Cody,
apparently proud to emulate Nazi tactics

The wheels of justice ground slow, but grind they do: In August 2023 the entire police department of Marion, Kansas, performed a Gestapo-like raid of a local newspaper’s offices as well as the homes the town’s vice mayor, the newspaper’s 98-year-old owner Joan Meyer (resulting in her death the next day from a heart attack), and one reporter.

All the evidence suggested the police chief, Gideon Cody, had performed the raid as a personal favor to a local businesswoman, Kari Newell, who was worried that newspaper might publish a story about her arrest for driving while intoxicated and without a license. Newell and Cody then worked together to use the police and a local judge, Laura Viar, to harass and hopefully destroy a newspaper. The newspaper survived, but their actions ended up killing its 98-year-old founder.

The public outrage was instantanous. Cody was soon suspended, and if Newell wished to keep her history out of the papers this raid was exactly the wrong way to do it. The story went national, exposing her drunk driving history to the world. Meanwhile five different federal lawsuits were filed against Cody and various other county and city officials. The reporter, Debbie Gruver, also resigned from the newspaper, saying she no longer felt comfortable in the Marion community.

It now appears that Cody, who officially resigned in October 2023, has now been charged with a crime in connection with the raid.
» Read more

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Let’s take a look at the college teachers and students who support Hamas and the torture and murder of little children

2:23 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Apparently too many college students and teachers
support Hamas despite these very obvious facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Fight! Fight! Fight! At the website Campus Reform one of its reporters, Michael Duke, has been doing magnificent work in identifying in detail college by college the students and professors who rioted this spring on numerous university campuses in support of the terrorist organization Hamas and its October 7, 2023 massacre of more than 1200 people, including the rape, torture, and murder of men, women, children, and babies.

I thought it was time to do the public a service and provide a link to all of Duke’s reports, so that future employees will have a handy place to go to find out whether the future college prospect before them thinks it is acceptable to kill babies in support of an ideology. Duke’s work has only begun, but it appears he is trying to identify every single pro-Hamas rioter this year who was arrested. His list so far:
» Read more

8 comments

It’s the audience that counts

11:27 am

The short clip below from the Stephen Colbert late night show has been making the rounds today. Colbert is interviewing a CNN news anchor and says the following, ““I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is.”

To his shock the audience laughs, clearly recognizing how inaccurate, stupid, and clueless Colbert’s description of CNN is. Kaitlan Collins, the news anchor, responds, “That supposed to be a laugh line?” and Colbert, clearly uncomfortable, answers, “It wasn’t supposed to be.”

Watch an enjoy:
» Read more

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Axiom’s next commercial manned mission to ISS delayed until 2025

9:26 am

Axiom’s next commercial manned mission to ISS, dubbed Ax-4, which had been targeting an October 2024 launch date, has now been delayed until 2025 because of “required interagency approval processes.”

NASA’s only announcement describing the delay was a tweet on X, which stated the following:

The Ax-4 crew members are pending approval to fly to the orbiting lab by the Multilateral Crew Operations Panel.

Neither Axiom nor NASA provided further comment or explanation. The mission will fly three passengers from India, Poland, and Hungary and be commanded by Peggy Whitson, a former NASA astronaut who now fulfills that role for Axiom. Since the three passengers are all government astronauts, it is possible that the bureaucracies from all three nations, plus NASA and its ISS partners, are entangled in negotiations far more complex than necessary.

This situation highlights quite clearly why both billionairs Jared Isaacman and Chun Wang have signed on with SpaceX to flight orbital missions — avoiding a docking with ISS — that require no permissions from NASA. Wang for example announced his deal yesterday, for a flight that is targeting a launch before the end of the year. Though that schedule is tight and might not be met, it appears the mission will likely fly before the Axiom one, which has been planned now for quite awhile.

4 comments

Trump to sue Justice Department over Mar-a-Lago raid and subsequent indictments

11:36 am

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Fight! Fight! Fight! According to a report today by Fox News, Trump’s lawyers are about to sue the Justice Department for $100 million, claiming the Mar-a-Lago raid and subsequent now-dismissed indictments by Jack Smith (who the courts have ruled was appointed illegally) were done with the “clear intent to engage in political persecution.”

Trump attorney Daniel Epstein filed the notice to sue the Justice Department. The Justice Department has 180 days from the date of receipt to respond to Epstein’s notice and come to a resolution. If no resolution is made, Trump’s case will move to federal court in the Southern District of Florida.

…Epstein argued that the DOJ violated Florida law, intrusion upon seclusion, which is recognized as a form of invasion of privacy. Intrusion upon seclusion includes “an intentional intrusion, physically or otherwise, into the private quarters of another person” and the intrusion “must occur in a manner that a reasonable person would find highly offensive.”
» Read more

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FAA cancels scheduled public meetings to review new Boca Chica environmental assessment

9:52 am

For as yet unknown reasons, the FAA today sent out an email canceling all the public meetings that it had scheduled in mid-July and were designed to allow the public to comment on its new environmental assessment of SpaceX’s application to increase its Starship/Superheavy launch rate at Boca Chica from five to as much as 25 launches per year.

The FAA is cancelling the in-person public meetings on the Draft EA scheduled for: Tuesday, August 13, 2024; 1:00 PM–3:00 PM & 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM CDT City of South Padre Island Convention Center, 7355 Padre Blvd, South Padre Island, TX 78597 Thursday, August 15, 2024; 1:00 PM–3:00 PM & 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM CDT Port Isabel Event & Cultural Center, 309 E Railroad Ave, Port Isabel, TX 78578 The FAA is also cancelling the virtual public meeting scheduled for: Tuesday, August 20, 2024; 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM CDT The FAA will provide notice for new dates for the meetings and a new date for the close of the comment period in the future.

The FAA’s email also noted that public comments can still be submitted either electronically here or by mail sent to Ms. Amy Hanson, FAA Environmental Specialist, SpaceX EA, c/o ICF 1902 Reston Metro Plaza Reston, VA 20190. In both cases, the commenter must reference Docket No. FAA-2024-2006. The email also stated that the public comment period would be extended beyond its August 29, 2024 closure date.

This cancellation mirrors the situation in 2021-2022, when the FAA was reviewing its previous environmental reassessment of the Boca Chica site. At that time the agency repeatedly failed to meet its own deadlines, sometimes on a month-by-month basis, so that the final approval process ended up stretching out more than a half year. Similar delays further stalled the first Starship/Superhavy test flight by another full year.

I once again suspect that higher ups in the White House are applying pressure on the FAA to stall this process, for political reasons, probably because those higher ups want no action taken before the November election. I am guessing, but this is how Washington works. Real achievement by American private citizens must always take a back seat to the power lusts of the DC politicos who now rule us.

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FAA red tape apparently stalling the next Starship/Superheavy orbital test launch

9:37 pm

Superheavy being captured by the tower chopsticks at landing
Superheavy being captured by the tower chopsticks at landing.
Click for video.

Back in mid-June, shortly after 4th orbital test flight of SpaceX’s Starship/Superheavy rocket, it appeared based on an FAA statement that the company could proceed with the next test flight as soon as it was ready to fly.

Subsequently, Elon Musk said the company expected to be ready by early August. There were also indications that the company wished to attempt a chopstick landing of Superheavy back at the launch tower at Boca Chica. Such an attempt however would require approval from the FAA, as the flight profile would not be the same as the previous flight.

I and others speculated that SpaceX would forego that chopstick landing in order to fly the fifth test flight quickly, while simultanously requesting permission from the FAA for such a landing on a later test flight. My thinking was that this would allow test flights to proceed with as little delay as possible.

Though it remains unknown whether or not the next test flight will include that chopstick landing attempt, it does appear that FAA red tape is blocking the next flight. In an update from NASASpaceflight.com about the work at Boca Chica posted on August 9, 2023 was a link to a SpaceX tweet the day before that said the following:
» Read more

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NASA inspector general blasts Boeing’s management relating to its work on SLS’s new more powerful upper stage

9:52 am

Boeing's schedule slips in building SLS's upper stage
Boeing’s schedule slips in building SLS’s upper stage

In a report issued today [pdf], NASA’s inspector general harshly criticized the Boeing managment and operations at its Michoud facility, where the company is developing SLS’s new more powerful upper stage. From the report’s executive summary:

Quality control issues at Michoud are largely due to the lack of a sufficient number of rained and experienced aerospace workers at Boeing. To mitigate these challenges, Boeing provides training and work orders to its employees. Considering the significant quality control deficiencies at Michoud, we found these efforts to be inadequate. For example, during our visit to Michoud in April 2023, we observed a liquid oxygen fuel tank dome—a critical component of the SLS Core Stage 3—segregated and pending disposition on whether and how it can safely be used going forward due to welds that did not meet NASA specifications. According to NASA officials, the welding issues arose due to Boeing’s inexperienced technicians and inadequate work order planning and supervision. The lack of a trained and qualified workforce increases the risk that Boeing will continue to manufacture parts and components that do not adhere to NASA requirements and industry standards.

The report also notes that delivery of that upper stage has been delayed from 2021 to 2027 (as shown by the graph to the right, taken from the IG report), and its cost has risen from $962 million to almost $2.8 billion. It also notes quite bluntly that:

Boeing’s quality management system at Michoud does not effectively adhere to industry standards or NASA requirements, resulting in production delays to the SLS core and upper stages and increased risk to the integrated spacecraft. … Boeing’s process for addressing contractual noncompliance has been ineffective, and the company has generally been nonresponsive in taking corrective actions when the same quality control issues reoccur.

Sound familiar? It should. These issues appear to be the same kind of quality control problems that have plagued Starliner, and are also the same kind of problems that had NASA reject Boeing’s bid to provide cargo to its Lunar Gateway station, and state while doing so that it will no longer consider future Boeing bids until the company straightens itself out.

It appears from today’s inspector general report that Boeing has fixed nothing. The report recommends some additional supervision of Boeing from NASA, and more importantly suggests the agency “institute financial penalties for Boeing’s noncompliance with quality control standards.”

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Florida proves that too many professors at public colleges might be better employed as dish washers

1:35 pm

Most of all beware this boy.’
As noted by the Spirit of Christmas Present in Dickens’ The Christmas
Carol, “This boy is ignorance, this girl is want. Beware them both,
but most of all beware this boy.” It appears Florida has taken this
warning to heart. Click for movie.

Last year the Republican-controlled state government in Florida passed legislation requiring its public universities to do what are called “post-tenure reviews” on all their tenured professors every five years, as part of an effort to eliminate what Governor Ron DeSantis called “deadweight” and “unproductive tenured faculty.” The bill not only limited the ability of professors to protest termination decisions, it was also aimed at eliminating “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs across the board.

At the University of Florida the first round of tenure review has now produced some startling numbers, literally proving DeSantis’ claims.

The report said that, out of 262 professors up for review, 31 “either retired, entered retirement agreements or resigned during the review period.” A further 34 didn’t meet expectations and five were dubbed unsatisfactory. Add those categories up, and it’s 27 percent.

In other words, when faced with a real review of their qualifications, more than a quarter of the professors either quit or were removed. Though it is unclear whether those who quit did so because they knew they’d be fired anyway, that conclusion is a reasonable one to make. By resigning, they avoid having a stain on their record and thus increase their chances of getting work elsewhere.
» Read more

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Students win settlement against college for censoring their speech illegally

2:04 pm

One poster that Clovis Community College tried to censor
One of the posters that Clovis Community College officials agreed to
“gladly” remove because it made some students “very uncomfortable.”

Bring a gun to a knife fight: Back in November 2021 three students at Clovis Community College who were also members of the college club for Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) got permission to put up posters on campus showing in detail the historic and documented horrors of communist rule worldwide. The picture to the right shows one such poster.

Soon thereafter some people supposedly complained that the posters made them “uncomfortable.” Despite the fact that everything in the posters is factually true, the then college president Lori Bennett ordered the posters torn down, claiming she did it because they weren’t specifically a “club announcement.

In August 2022 the students sued [pdf] with the help of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), noting that Bennett’s policy was not only inconsistent and arbitrarily, it was mostly used to block conservative political statements college administrators did not like.

The students have now won a settlement in court.
» Read more

9 comments

NASA has decided to consider bringing Starliner down unmanned

10:32 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

It appears that upper management at NASA has decided to force the agency to consider bringing Starliner down unmanned and extending the ISS mission of the two Starliner astronauts to a nine month mission.

The situation is definitely complicated, and no change as yet as been made. The schedule of dockings to ISS has been reconfigured to make this option possible. It appears this is the present plan:

First, they need to upgrade the software on Starliner for an unmanned mission. Apparently the present software on board is not satisfactory for an unmanned docking, even though a different Starliner has already done an unmanned docking last year. For this mission, the software relied on the astronauts to take over manually should there be an issue during undocking. In the previous unmanned demo, the software would react and prevent a problem. For reasons that make no sense, the software on the manned mission did not have this capability. Reinstalling this software will give them the option to send the two astronauts down on Dragon and returning Starliner unmanned.

Second, the next Dragon manned mission has been delayed until late September to allow time for these software upgrades, as well as give NASA and Boeing more time to analyze the situation and decide if a manned return on Starliner is possible. If they decide to not use Starliner, the Dragon capsule would come up to ISS with only two astronauts, and the two Starliner astronauts would then join them on their six month mission, coming home in the spring. For the Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams this would mean their mission will now be 8-9 months long, far longer than the original one-two week mission.

As to why these options are now being considered, it appears to me that both Boeing and NASA engineers were willing to return the astronauts on Starliner, but have been ordered to consider these options by higher ups. It appears that the last hot-fire thruster tests on ISS left everyone with some uncertainties about the situation. Engineers are fairly certain that the reasons some thrusters did not fire as planned during docking was because teflon seals expanded because of heat to block fuel flow. The problem is that these seals showed no problem at all in the most recent test on ISS. That difference creates some uncertainty as to whether they have really identified the cause of the problem. Imagine having an intermittent problem your car mechanic cannot constently make happen.

Because the thrusters did work as intended, Boeing and NASA seemed ready to return Starliner manned. In the agency review last week it appears others at the top were less sanguine (including Bill Nelson, NASA’s administrator), and demanded these new options be considered. Based on this speculation, it is almost certain Starliner will come home empty.

Whether this will have significant consequences remains uncertain. During the press briefing today, NASA officials said the agency might still certify Starliner for operational manned missions even if the capsule comes home unmanned.

21 comments

Charges against pro-Hamas rioters have routinely been dropped nationwide

1:23 pm

The instruction manual of the left
The instruction manual of the left

According to an excellent report today at the website Campus Reform, charges against more than 300 pro-Hamas rioters that illegally occupied and damaged campuses at eleven different universities nationwide have been dropped by prosecutors.

The list is discouraging, to put it mildly:

  • School of the Art Institute of Chicago: 80 criminal charges were dropped
  • University of Texas at Austin: 79 criminal charges were dropped
  • Indiana University: 56 criminal charges were dropped
  • Columbia University: 31 criminal charges have been dropped
  • California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt: 27 criminal charges have been dropped
  • University of Minnesota: 9 criminal charges have been dropped
  • University of New Hampshire: 8 criminal charges have been dropped
  • The City University of New York: 7 criminal charges have been dropped
  • Northwestern University: 4 criminal charges have been dropped

The reasons why prosecutors have dropped these charges are manifold. In some cases (such as in California, Illinois, and New York), the prosecutors were partisan Democrats who approved of the riots, and thus acted to protect the rioters by dropping the charges. In several cases however the prosecutors expressed extreme unhappiness with their own action, stating that they did so reluctantly because they did not think they could win in court.
» Read more

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Inspector General: Roman Space Telescope is meeting the budget overruns and schedule delays NASA predicted

4:57 pm

According to the twisted language in a new NASA inspector general report [pdf] describing the present status of the Roman Space Telescope, the project is on schedule and on budget because NASA decided to predict ahead of time how much it would behind schedule and over budget at this moment. From its executive summary:

[A]s of March 2024, Roman was meeting its cost obligations and schedule to launch by May 2027. Roman was on track to launch despite encountering contractor performance issues and cost overruns related to hardware anomalies, under scoping of work, and inadequate oversight of subcontractors. Roman remains on schedule because Science Mission Directorate officials conducted a replan in May 2021 to mitigate the expected cost and schedule growth caused by COVID-19, increasing the life-cycle cost estimate from $3.9 billion to $4.3 billion. This replan also included delaying the launch readiness date from October 2026 to May 2027. As of March 2024, Roman was tracking its project reserves and potential delays with L3Harris as its top risks. Roman has been using its project reserves to mitigate cost growth related to L3Harris’s performance challenges. Despite these contract value increases, Roman is still within its life-cycle cost estimate because the project’s reserves cover these extra costs.

The insulting nature of this inspector general report is astonishing. The administrative state really does think the American public is too stupid to notice this. I wonder if they are right.

The report further notes issues with the telescope’s two subcontractors, BAE Systems and L3Harris, as well as warning of insufficient ground-based antenna capacity for downloading the data that Roman will produce.

[A]s of April 2024, the NSN [Near Space Network] did not have adequate capacity to support Roman’s mission requirements without planned upgrades to the White Sands antenna and lacked the funding to implement the necessary upgrades by the mission’s launch readiness date.

In other words, more money will be needed to build more ground antennas, something that NASA conveniently forgot to mention when it first proposed Roman to Congress. How interesting, but completely par for the course.

Hat tip stringer Jay.

3 comments

My heart bleeds: The new head of the Secret Service is hurt because his people are “hurting”

1:39 pm

New Secret Service head Robert Rowe testifying before the Senate
New Secret Service head Robert Rowe
testifying before the Senate

During testimony earlier this week before a Senate committee, the new head of the Secret Service, Robert Rowe, was asked by Senator Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tennessee) to comment on the whistleblower email that claimed the only interest of the agency’s top five supervisors was to cover their ass, not fix the incompetence that allowed a sniper to kill one innocent bystander and injure three others, including presidential canddate Donald Trump.

Rowe’s response summed up his misplaced priorities perfectly, and showed the utter truth of the whistleblower’s accusations.

Blackburn: I want to know how you feel about the fact that employees in your agency are worried about covering their behind. And not worried about protecting a former president.

Rowe: Thank you, Senator. So, I am hurt by that email, but not in the way you think I’m saying it. I’m hurt because my people are hurting right now. … My agency is hurting. Um, Emotions are raw.

How horrible. People at the Secret Service are “hurting!”
» Read more

10 comments

ULA squelches independent photography of its launches

10:27 am

For reasons that appear fundamentally stupid, ULA early in July announced that it will now forbid independent freelance photographers who use the remote sites inside the launch facility at Cape Canaveral from selling their pictures independently.

The language was clear: Photographers were welcome to set up remote shots at ULA launches if they worked for the media or wanted to post their work on social media. However, photographers could not sell this work independently, including as prints for fellow enthusiasts or for use in annual calendars.

“ULA will periodically confirm editorial publication for media participating in remote camera placement,” the email stated. “If publication does not occur, or photos are sold outside of editorial purposes, privileges to place remote cameras may be revoked.”

In other words, photographers who come to Cape Canaveral to take pictures will only be allowed to do so it they are working for professional media, or are selling their work to news outlets. Photographers who make a living selling prints to collectors, or simply post them on social media in order to garner traffic, will eventually lose their access to the sites.

The article suggests this policy was instituted because managing the number of photographers had become unwieldy, but that is a pure guess, since ULA has not provided any explanation, nor has it responded to any questions from other press outlets.

From a PR point of view, this decison by ULA makes no sense. All it does is antagonize the public and the press, while reducing its public footprint. In this age of social media, publicity comes not just from major media outlets, but from the independent individuals writing for their own websites or X feeds.

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First flight of government-built hopper to test vertical landings delayed two years

10:12 am

Callisto's basic design
Callisto’s basic design

This story about a first stage government-built Grasshopper-type rocket designed to demonstrate and test vertical landing has instead become a perfect demonstration of why governments should not design, build, and own anything.

It appears the first test flight of the Callisto test rocket, first proposed in 2015 and being built by a joint partnership of the German (DLR), French (CNES), and Japanese (JAXA) space agencies, has now slipped from 2024 to 2026.

Earlier this month, CNES deployed a refreshed website. Prior to that deployment, the agency’s Callisto project page had stated that the rocket’s first flight would occur in 2024. The new Callisto project page has a more detailed timeline, stating that the detailed design phase will be completed by the end of 2024. Vehicle integration in Japan is then expected in 2025, followed by a first launch from the Guiana Space Centre between 2025 and 2026. This revision outlines an approximate two-year slip in the project’s timeline. [emphasis mine]

These three agencies took almost a decade to simply conceive and design the project. Apparently they not yet even built anything. This despite a budget of slightly less than $100 million carved out of the entire budget for creating the Ariane-6 expendable. Compare that with SpaceX, which conceived its Grasshopper vertical test prototype in 2011, began flying that year, and resulted in an actual Falcon 9 first stage landing in 2015.

Will Callisto ever fly? Maybe, but don’t expect it to produce a rocket that is financially competitive with SpaceX. Instead, expect these three government agencies to subsidize its cost in order to make its price competitive on the open market. More likely Callisto will fly a few times, but will likely result in no new orbital rocket. Instead it will be superseded by the private rocket startups worldwide that are now building actual orbital rockets and will likely make them reuseable before Callisto even leaves the ground.

3 comments

Unlike the white community, a real politcal conversation is finally happening among blacks

1:27 pm

The moment on Anton Daniels podcast when things changed
Click for full video.

Earlier this week a short clip was posted on a lot of conservative media from a zoom podcast that I think was organized by black podcaster Anton Daniels. In that short clip, one of the participants, a black woman going by the label “Page” said that she planned to vote for Kamala Harris solely because “She is a black woman.” She felt it important to do so to finally have a black woman as president.

The image to the right captures the reaction of the other participants, almost all of whom immediately showed either disgust or contempt or amusement by her words. Their verbal response began with several noting repeatedly that Harris isn’t even black, but then Anton Daniels broke in to note that this is irrelevant and beside the point. He then gave a short but very educated lesson on the failures of identity politics, the Democratic Party, and Kamala Harris. I have transcribed the full exchange below, highlighting what I consider the most important thing said during the entire exchange, because it tells us something very very profound. And you will need to look close, because that thing is almost certainly not what you expect it to be.
» Read more

38 comments

Boeing names new CEO, set to take over on August 8, 2024

10:32 am

Boeing today named a new CEO, Robert “Kelly” Ortberg, who among the candidates being considered appears to be the only one who did not have a long career at Boeing.

Ortberg emerged as a leading candidate only recently. Others who were reportedly considered for the job included Patrick Shanahan, a former Boeing executive and now CEO of its most important supplier, Spirit AeroSystems, and another longtime Boeing executive, Stephanie Pope, who recently took over the commercial airplanes division.

Ortberg led Rockwell Collins from 2013 to 2018, when it merged with United Technologies and wound up as part of RTX, the company formerly known as Raytheon. He retired from RTX in 2021.

He will take charge of the company as of August 8, 2024.

It remains to be seen if Ortberg can fix things. As the article notes, since 2019 Boeing has lost more than $25 billion, and has been saddled with numerous quality control failures in almost all its technical divisions, from building airplanes to providing maintenance to building space capsules. The failures in its airplane divisions resulted in several crashes that killed 346 people, and caused it to accept a deal with the Justice Department that included a fine of $243.6 million to avoid a criminal trial. That deal however has not yet been accepted by the judge in the case.

Ortberg will have to demonstrate somehow that the culture at Boeing itself has changed. The first thing he could do to indicate he is serious about doing so would be to shut down entirely Boeing’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy. Getting rid of that poisonous race-based anti-quality program would go a long way in convincing others that Ortberg means business, and wants to put talent, skills, experience first in everything Boeing does, something previous CEOs have clearly not done.

10 comments

A review of Japan’s effort to create a commercial space industry

9:54 am

Link here. The article does a nice job outlining the efforts of the new startups in Japan that have been successful in flying missions, such as the orbital tug company Astroscale and the lunar lander company Ispace, as well as newer companies such as Shachu, which proposes building and selling modules for use on any one of the new commercial space stations under construction.

The article also talks at length about Japan’s newly created ten year $6.5 billion strategic fund, designed to be provide funding for many different commercial projects and inspired by NASA recent switch from being the designer, builder, and owner of everything to simply a customer buying products from the private sector.

The fund has been given to Japan’s space agency to administer, and it remains unclear whether that government agency is prepared to give up power to the private sector as NASA has. This quote illustrates this uncertainty:

Since the effort is just starting, both companies and JAXA are uncertain how well the fund will work. Yasuo Ishii, senior vice president of JAXA, said the agency has assigned 450 people to administer the fund, including researchers and other experts. “We used to be an R&D institution and now we’re a funder,” he said.

He said JAXA will closely monitor progress on the initial awards made through the fund. “If some don’t go well, we may terminate them.”

It seems JAXA is so far using this fund to establish a large bureaucracy for itself, rather than issuing contracts to the private sector to build things JAXA needs.

We shall see how this plays out. The Japanese aerospace industry appears to be similar to the American space industry around 2008, with lots of old established big companies working hand-in-glove with the government space agency and a lot of small startups trying to establish themselves as competitors. In the U.S. at that time NASA was very resistant to give contracts to the startups. It took strong political pressure from within the upper levels of government, first in the Obama administration and then in the Trump administration, to force a change at NASA. Whether this will happen in Japan remains unknown.

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Secret Service agent reveals the edifice of incompetency and stupidity that permeates the entire federal government

2:27 pm

You would have to live under a rock, or rely entirely on mainstream media news sources, to not know that in the past twenty years the work of most federal government agencies had almost always been incompetent and badly managed, resulting in failed projects and vast amounts of money spent to get nothing accomplished. Only two recent examples come to mind immediately:

The second story is an even more egregious failure. After three years the program has so far failed to provide any American internet service. In that same time period SpaceX’s Starlink service, by itself, provided millions service worldwide, and did it for far less.

Letter of condemnation by secret service sniper
Letter of condemnation by secret service sniper. Click for original.

This reality of governmental failure was driven home even more harshly today when it was revealed that a Secret Service agent has sent out an agency-wide email [enhanced screen capture to the right], condemning the entire supervisor leadership at that agency, and insisting that he will continue to speak up publicly “… until 5 high-level supervisors (1 down) are either fired or removed from their current positions.” He went on to note that

I have conveyed these thoughts to not only supervisors (to include the current Captain of CS [Counter Snipers], but those responsible for training us (SOTS/CS). Only to be brushed off as those with less experience somehow knew more than me.”

» Read more

13 comments

Google monitors and censors Gmail and Googlegroup emails for political content it dislikes

1:07 pm

Google, hostile to free speech

Reason 2,458,210,539 to stop using Google: We now have solid evidence that Google monitors and censors emails sent out using either Gmail or to Googlegroup listservs, because it censored emails discussing Robert F. Kennedy’s independent candidacy for the presidency.

The story at the link describes how the author, Lori Wentz of the Brownstone Institute, on June 27, 2024 emailed to a Googlegroups listserv a link to an X livestream where Kennedy would give his own answers to the questions in the live debate between Trump and Biden on June 28, 2024. In doing so the author also included some of her own thoughts, which resulted in an exchange on the political listserv about the subject. She subsequently got the following notice from Googlegroups:

“We’re letting you know that we’ve permanently removed [your] content…An external report flagged the content for illegal or policy violations. As a result, our legal content and policy standards team removed the content for the following reason: unwanted content.”

Wentz had no way of finding out what that “unwanted content” was, as Googlegroups did not provide this essential information, instead informing her that she would simply have “to pursue your claims in court.”
» Read more

5 comments

FAA releases proposed environmental assessment of Boca Chica permitting more Starship/Superheavy launches

10:19 am

Superheavy/Starship lifting off on March 14, 2024
Superheavy/Starship lifting off on March 14, 2024

In advance of several planned public meetings, the FAA today released [pdf] its proposed environmental assessment of SpaceX’s proposal to increase the number of orbital launches allowed per year from Boca Chica from 5 to 25.

The report makes for some fascinating reading. First and foremost it indicates the FAA’s general approval of this new launch cadence. That approval however must also be given by the public in comments at those meetings, as well as by the National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Expect serious objections from the NPS and USFSW, both of which have acted to slow or stop SpaceX in the past, when each was given the opportunity. Both have a new opportunity here.
» Read more

5 comments

Senate gives NASA cash to stop its tantrum

9:35 am

Surprise, surprise! As expected after NASA proposed major cuts in several missions, such as the Chandra Space Telescope and the OSAM demo robotic refueling mission, the subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee has rejected those cuts and instead proposed that NASA not only get everything it asked for, it be forced to take more money than it requested.

I am certain that NASA is not going to complain, as this was its plan from day one. The cancellation of Chandra was intended as a toddler’s tantrum that our weak Congress was certain to bow to and come up with the cash. It has now done so.

The report directs NASA to spend at least $98.3 million on Hubble and up to $72.1 million on Chandra, similar to the budgets for those missions in recent years, emphasizing the ability of the telescopes to work in conjunction with the James Webb Space Telescope.

In this case the Senate action makes some sense, as these cuts would have been penny wise and pound foolish. But NASA knew that. If the Senate was really interested in controlling the budget (which it is not) it would have funded Chandra and Hubble as described, but demanded cuts from NASA elsewhere.

Instead the Senate committee not only demands that these telescopes be maintained, it doles out extra money the nation doesn’t have for other projects that NASA wanted to cut for entirely legitimate reasons. OSAM for example was conceived more than a decade ago as a mission designed to demonstrate robotic refueling in space. After spending a billion and a decade, it had still not flown, and during that time private companies had not only successfully demonstrated this capability several times for far less, they had done so in a far simpler and more profitable manner. The technical need for OSAM was gone. Why spend the additional billion we can’t afford for a project that will prove nothing?

Congress, especially the Senate, likes wasting money however, and so the appropriations committee in an entirely bi-partisan effort is pushing to revive OSAM, as well as several other projects that have either gone over budget or NASA had deemed correctly were unaffordable.

The dark age has already begun in many ways, but its official start will be marked by future historians by the date the United States undergoes a full financial collapse, due to its government’s unwillingness to rein in a national debt that is now in the many many trillions and growing uncontrollably each day.

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Local billionaire landowner renews his oppposition to the Sutherland spaceport

10:58 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

An effort by the proposed Sutherland spaceport on the north coast of Scotland to place a tracking dish on a nearby peak — where other telecommunication dishes are already installed — is now being fought by local billionaire landowner Anders Holch Povlsen, who had previously tried and failed to stop construction of the spaceport entirely.

The spaceport’s main customer, the rocket startup Orbex, has already experienced endless red tape from the United Kingdom’s Civil Aviation Authority (CAA). It applied for a launch license in February 2022, and almost two-and-a-half years later still has not gotten an approval. It had previously announced a first launch that year, and has been stymied since, not only by the CAA but by local authorities who have demanded it make many changes to its construction plans.

Povlsen, who has himself invested in the competing Saxavord spaceport on the Shetland Islands, has repeatedly acted to block Sutherland, so far with no success. This new suit is especially absurd — claiming the new dish would harm the local landscape — which is why the local councils appear ready to reject it.
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Report: Law enforcement officers nationwide no longer trust the FBI, and will not work with it

12:51 pm

Kamala Harris joking about killing Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Jeff Sessions
Kamala Harris as she enthusiaticallly joked on television
about killing Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Jeff Sessions

A just released scathing and horrifying report put together by the National Alliance of Retired and Active Duty FBI Special Agents and Analysts has found extensive nationwide evidence that local law enforcement officers so distrust the FBI they will no longer cooperate with it in any way.

You can read the report here. It came to the following ten conclusions:

  • Local law enforcement officers do not trust the FBI
  • Local law enforcement no longer share actionable, substantive information with the FBI
  • FBI National Academy graduates are troubled by bias
  • Routinely poor management and ineffective leadership found in FBI-led task forces
  • The FBI is isolated and unresponsive to local law enforcement
  • Local law enforcement officers feel disrespected by FBI special agents
  • Today’s tone-deaf FBI disregards the value of retired FBI special agents
  • The new generation of FBI special agents are seen as “completely worthless”
  • FBI management is too transitory and obsessed with self-promotion
  • The FBI’s cult of narcissism begins at the FBI Academy

For conservatives who have been paying attention for the past decade, none of these conclusions are a surprise. The FBI, as well as the CIA, ATF, the Secret Service as well as the entire intelligence and security community in the federal government have not only demonstrated obvious incompetence in their basic jobs since Obama was president, these agencies have clearly become partisan weaponized tools for the Democratic Party.
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Perseverance finds intriguing geology, and the press goes crazy

9:58 am

Intriguing Martian rock
Click for original image.

A press release from JPL yesterday described an intriguing rock (image to the right) that the Mars rover Perseverance science team has recently been studying, and in doing so repeatedly hinted that its features suggest the possibility of past Martian life. From its first two paragraphs:

A vein-filled rock is catching the eye of the science team of NASA’s Perseverance rover. Nicknamed “Cheyava Falls” by the team, the arrowhead-shaped rock contains fascinating traits that may bear on the question of whether Mars was home to microscopic life in the distant past.

Analysis by instruments aboard the rover indicates the rock possesses qualities that fit the definition of a possible indicator of ancient life. The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water. Other explanations for the observed features are being considered by the science team, and future research steps will be required to determine whether ancient life is a valid explanation.

Not surprisingly the press immediately went crazy. Here are just a few headlines:
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Saxavord: We will get our last required spaceport license by September

11:45 pm

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

My heart be still: According to one official of the Saxavord spaceport in the Shetland Islands, it expects to get its last required spaceport license from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) of the United Kingdom sometime in September of this year.

In a presentation at the Farnborough International Airshow here July 23, Scott Hammond, deputy chief executive and operations director of SaxaVord Spaceport, said he expected the spaceport to receive the last of the licenses from U.K. regulators in September needed to host the inaugural launch of Rocket Factory Augsburg’s RFA ONE rocket there.

The red tape getting the first launch off at Saxavord has been odious and disheartening, to say the least. After almost two years of deliberations, the CAA awarded the spaceport its spaceport license in December 2023. This finally allowed it to be a spaceport, but apparently that was insufficient for it to be allowed to do any launches. The CAA then took three more months to issue what it called the range license.

Saxavord was still not allowed to do any launches. The CAA demanded one more license for what it calls “airspace access for launches.” I have no idea how this is different than the range license, unless the CAA has separated control of the surface from the air space, and thus requires two separate licenses for each. Either way, getting that approved has now dragged on for months. No one should be confident Saxavord’s September prediction for approval will turn out to be true.

All these licenses however will still not permit any launches to proceed. The CAA also requires each particular rocket company to get its own launch license. Though Saxavord as well as Rocket Factory are targeting a launch before the end of the year, soon after getting that last airspace license, they might be counting their chickens before they hatch, based on the CAA’s track record with Virgin Orbit.

After Cornwall got all its CAA licenses to allow Virgin Orbit to launch from that airport, Virgin thought it would be able to get is launch license quickly and launch within only a few months. Instead, the CAA took about a year to issue Virgin its launch license, with that long delay eventually becoming the main reason the company went bankrupt.

Rocket Factory unfortunately appears to have locked itself into Saxavord. It has already done a static fire test of its first stage there, and has delivered the rocket’s upper stage. If the CAA takes its time again giving its approval, the startup might find itself bleeding cash, as Virgin Orbit did.

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The anti-Semitic Pro-Hamas Democratic Party shows its colors again

5:17 pm

Democrats burn American flags in support of Hamas
Democrats burn American flags in support of Hamas

Today the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, came to Washington to meet with American government officials and give a speech before both houses of Congress.

Not surprisingly, numerous Democrats both inside and outside Congress showed their hatred of Israel and love of the Hamas terrorists, enthusiastically slandering Netanyahu, Israel, and its struggle to survive while elevating terrorists into “freedom fighters”, even though on October 7 last year those Hamas fighters weren’t fighting for freedom, they were out to kill Jews, eagerly raping, torturing, and murdering more than a thousand men, women, children, and babies simply because they were present inside Israel.

Inside Congress more than forty Democrats boycotted Netanyahu’s speech, including Vice President Kamala Harris (now running for president against Trump). Apparently Harris is courting the American Hamas voting block. Democrats who did attend made it clear in numerous ways that they oppose the right of Israel and Jews to exist and that they support Hamas’ murder of women, children and babies, though of course they couched their statements in cute ways filled with lies in order to give themselves plausible deniability. For example, Nancy Pelosi said this:
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Judge issues injunction against NLRB in favor of SpaceX

10:34 am

NLRB logo

A U.S. federal district judge today issued an injunction against the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), blocking any further action on its complaint against SpaceX until the courts rule on the constitutionality of that complaint, accepting SpaceX’s position that the NLRB’s decision to suspend that complaint pending a court decision was irrelevant.

The NLRB has sued SpaceX, claiming it had violated the labor rights of several former employees because it fired them for criticizing Musk publicly. SpaceX responded by suing the NLRB itself, claiming the law which founded it and allowed it to act as prosecutor, judge, and jury in all cases while also limiting the President’s ability to fire its officials was unconstitutional.

As the case moved through the courts, the NLRB suspended its case against SpaceX. The company however demanded this injunction as well, since it considered that suspension merely a ploy that could be rescinded at any time.

Judge Albright ruled in favor of SpaceX and imposed an injunction as the case proceeds. He said the ruling came in part because of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s ruling that restrictions on removal for administrative law judges in the Securities and Exchange Commission are unconstitutional.

You can read the judge’s decision here [pdf]. This quote from it however is very telling:
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SpaceX’s contract to de-orbit ISS reveals the inability of the older space companies to compete

9:49 am

Link here. The article goes into detail about the bidding process that led to SpaceX winning the contract $843 million fixed-price contract to build a specialized Dragon capsule to dock with ISS and de-orbit it. While its focus is on the refusal of the older companies (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing) to sign the fixed-price contracts that NASA now prefers and that SpaceX can handle with no problem, it was this section that struck me the most:

SpaceX’s bid price was $680 million. The source selection statement did not reveal a price for Northrop’s bid other than saying it was “significantly higher.” Based on NASA’s budget request, Northrop’s bid was likely approximately twice as high.

But SpaceX did not just win on price. Its “mission suitability” score, effectively its technical ability to design, develop, and fly a vehicle capable of deorbiting the space station, was 822, compared to Northrop’s score of 589. SpaceX’s approach had one weakness, compared to seven weaknesses in Northrop’s bid, according to NASA evaluators.

Finally, the selection was also based on past performance by the contractors. SpaceX’s performance was rated as “very high,” given how it has delivered with the Cargo and Crew Dragon spacecraft and its Falcon 9 rocket. Northrop’s performance on Cygnus and its various rockets was given a “moderate” rating. Overall, the NASA evaluators expressed a “very high level” of confidence in SpaceX being able to complete the mission, whereas a “moderate level” of confidence was expressed in Northrop.

In other words, Northrop not only couldn’t do the job as cheaply and wasn’t even willing to do it at a fixed price, its technical performance has not been that good either.

The article focuses rightly on the present lack of any viable competitors to SpaceX, and the problems this raises for the entire American aerospace industry. I want to point out how this situation reveals a much more fundamental problem with the industry itself. The established aerospace industry is not only doing poor work, it is overcharging for it.

Or to put it more bluntly, it is unwilling or unable to compete. Relying on businesses with such bankrupt attitudes is not a good way to get anything done.

The hope had been that the newer startups (Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, Relativity, Firefly, etc) would pick up this slack, but except for Blue Origin the rocket capabilities of these companies are just not big enough yet to do it. Blue Origin’s proposed New Glenn rocket and associated spacecraft could do the job, but the company has demonstrated for the past decade its desire to emulate the older and failing big space companies rather than a new fresh face.

The new companies, given time, could solve this problem, since they are all willing to innovate and compete, but the apparent increase in the regulations imposed by the FAA and other government agencies in the past two years suggests they will be squelched as well.

Unless something changes, the U.S. is not going to see the space renaissance that seemed so promising only two years ago.

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