An evening pause: The tower is in Watts, Oklahoma. When the lineman looks to his right he is looking at the helicopter, which for the first few minutes, before it rises above the horizon, is difficult to see.
Hat tip Wayne DeVette.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 10, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
My reason to posting this I admit is selfish and tourist-oriented. This narrow ridge, about a mile long and about 300 to 600 feet high, appeals directly to my hiking passions. A trail along its length would provide any hiker some really spectactular views.
The scientists took the picture because of the geology. The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, a short channel dubbed Daga Vallis that connects two major canyons in the eastern part of Valles Marineris, the largest known canyon system in the solar system. This ridge and several nearby parallel ridges were apparently made of something, possibly lava, that was resistent to the theorized ancient catastrophic floods that scientists presently believe carved out these channels and canyons.
In the inset the dotted line indicates one possible hiking trail route that travels the full length of the ridge but then heads south to continue along the rim of a 1,200-foot-high cliff face. For future Martian colonists, I offer this site as a great place to set up a bed-and-breakfast, surrounded by many potential hikes of incredible stark beauty.
Though the press release was lacking in many details, Rocket Lab yesterday announced the signing of its first launch contract for its new Neutron rocket, scheduled to make its first orbital test launch in 2025.
Under the contract, Rocket Lab will launch two dedicated missions on Neutron starting from mid-2026. The missions will launch from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 3 on Wallops Island, Virginia. The launch service agreement for these missions signifies the beginning of a productive collaboration that could see Neutron deploy the entire constellation.
The press release did not name the satellite constellation, or the company building it. Rocket Lab’s founder and CEO, Peter Beck, was quoted as follows: “Constellation companies and government satellite operators are desperate for a break in the launch monopoly.” [emphasis mine] That launch monopoly is clearly SpaceX, and Beck was positioning Rocket Lab with Neutron as the company to provide an alternative.
The announcement as well as the company’s third quarter report caused a 45% surge in its stock price.
The rocket startup Firefly has now raised another $175 million of private investment capital, during a new round of funding, on top of another $300 million raised previously.
Firefly Aerospace has raised $175 million in a round led by a new investor to support production of launch vehicles and spacecraft with an increased focus on responsive space capabilities.
The company announced Nov. 12 it raised what it described as an oversubscribed Series D round led by RPM Ventures. Several other existing and new ventures also participated in the round, which values Firefly at more than $2 billion.
That valuation is an increase from the $1.5 billion the company reported in November 2023 when it closed the final tranche of a Series C round. The company did not disclose the size of that earlier round but said then it had raised about $300 million since February 2023.
It appears RPM likes how the company has focused on providing the military launch services, which can also be profitable for private satellite customers. This money will be used to help increase the production of Firefly’s Alpha rocket.
JPL in California announced today a layoff of 325 workers, about 5% of its workforce, the third major layoff imposed this year.
The JPL press release indicates the layoffs are because of NASA budget cutbacks, but does not provide any specificity. The cause centers mostly around NASA’s decision to pause its Mars Sample Return project, which JPL was leading. From this report:
This is the third round of layoffs at JPL this year, a reduction spurred primarily by major budgetary cuts to the Mars Sample Return mission, which is managed by JPL. NASA directed $310 million this year to the effort to bring Mars rocks back to Earth, a steep drop from the $822.3 million it spent on the program the previous year.
In January, 100 on-site contractors at JPL were let go after NASA instructed the lab to reduce spending in anticipation of a much tighter budget. In February, the lab laid off 530 employees — approximately 8% of its workforce — and another 40 contractors.
It increasingly appears that JPL’s place in the redesigned mission could be significantly reduced.
The press release also makes it sound like these cutbacks are the end of the world. As JPL has mostly functioned for decades as a private institution attached to NASA almost like a government agency, no one there ever expects to get laid off. In the real world however layoffs such as this happen all the time, especially when a company fails to deliver. JPL in recent years has had budget and management problems, epitomized by the problems now seen with that sample return mission, so it should not be surprised by these cutbacks from NASA.
For the first time a cargo Dragon capsule used its Draco attitude thrusters to test their ability to adjust or raise ISS’s orbit.
NASA and SpaceX monitored operations as the company’s Dragon spacecraft performed its first demonstration of reboost capabilities for the International Space Station at 12:50 p.m. EST on Friday. The spacecraft’s Draco thrusters adjusted the station’s orbit through a reboost of altitude by 7/100 of a mile at apogee and 7/10 of a mile at perigee, lasting approximately 12 minutes and 30 seconds.
This posting is late because of my Grand Canyon trip, but I’m posting this now to make sure it is on the webpage. The goal of the test was to prove another American method for adjusting ISS’s orbit, in order to replace the Russian Progress capsules which now do the job. This test proved Dragon’s thrusters can be used for small orbital adjustments, but whether it can do major orbital corrections remains unclear. A previous test using Cygnus had already showed it could do the job.
In what appears to be a first, Polaris Spaceplane on October 29, 2024 successfully completed the first ever inflight ignition of an aerospike engine, using its Mira-2 unmanned engineering prototype.
Later in the day on 29 October, MIRA II took off from Peenemünde Airport on the coast of the Baltic Sea with a takeoff mass of 229 kilograms, which represented a reduced propellant load. The vehicle flew to the ignition point over the Baltic Sea, approximately 3 kilometres away from the ground station, and once there, completed a short three-second burn of its AS-1 aerospike engine. During the short burn, MIRA II experienced an acceleration of 4 m/s².
According to the company, the engine operated at a reduced chamber pressure during the three-second burn, resulting in a fuel-rich combustion.
There have been several attempts in the past to develop the aerospike engine, none of which ever completed any test flights, as far as I am aware. The concept is that the thrust is released in a string of openings, with only one wall forming the nozzle shape and the atmosphere used to complete the nozzle on the other side. As the atmospheric density changes the nozzle shape thus changes its shape, producing the most efficient thrust throughout the engine’s entire flight.
More test flights will be required before the company will be able to begin work on its full scale Aurora spaceplane.
Skynet-1A, a British satellite launched in 1969 and out of commission since the 1970s, has now been found in an unexpected location in geosynchronous orbit, and no one knows how it got there.
Launched in 1969, just a few months after humans first set foot on the Moon, Skynet-1A was put high above Africa’s east coast to relay communications for British forces. When the spacecraft ceased working a few years later, gravity might have been expected to pull it even further to the east, out over the Indian Ocean.
But today, curiously, Skynet-1A is actually half a planet away, in a position 22,369 miles (36,000km) above the Americas. Orbital mechanics mean it’s unlikely the half-tonne military spacecraft simply drifted to its current location. Almost certainly, it was commanded to fire its thrusters in the mid-1970s to take it westwards. The question is who that was and with what authority and purpose?
The article attempts to suggest the orbit change was done for some nefarious purpose, but the most likely explanation is that at some point the British engineers who operated it ordered the required engine burns, but the records of that work are now lost.
Though the present location poses some problems for other geosynchronous satellites, Skynet-1A also now offers a great opportunity for a mission demonstrating a way to clean up junk in these orbits.
China today successfully launched four new remote-sensing satellites, its Long March 2C rocket lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
No word on where the rocket’s lower stages, which use very toxic hypergoic fuels, crashed.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
110 SpaceX
50 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 128 to 76, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 110 to 94.
SpaceX tonight launched another 20 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg in California.
Of the 20 satellites, 13 were the direct-to-cellphone version. The first stage completed its eleventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
110 SpaceX
49 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 128 to 75, while SpaceX by itself now leads the entire world, including American companies, 110 to 93.
With the first launch of Sierra Space’s first Dream Chaser reusable unmanned cargo mini-shuttle, Tenacity, now scheduled for May 2025, the company has announced that it is beginning work on a second cargo spaceplane, dubbed Reverence, along with a mission control center to operate its fleet in orbit.
Sierra Space spokesperson Alex Walker shared the new May 2025 estimate and said work on Reverence, also known as DC-102, will resume once the team returns to Colorado — but declined to clarify when that would happen. At that point, Walker said, it will likely be another 18 months before the second spaceplane is complete. In addition to the fleet of cargo-carrying craft, Sierra Space is also working on a crewed variant of the vessel, labeled the DC-200 series, and a national security DC-300 variant.
Company officials say each mini-shuttle is good for 15 flights, so having both vehicles gives the company a total of 30 flights to sell to various space station and orbital customers.
Selling to others outside NASA may be necessary, because Tenacity is four-plus years behind schedule. By the time it begins flying ISS will already be approaching retirement in only a few short years.
The company intends these new Dream Chaser projects to work in tandem with its LIFE inflatable modules, which are presently being developed as part of the Blue Origin-led Orbital Reef space station. And while much of work on the rest of that station appears moribund, it appears that Sierra is developing everything needed for its own space station. We should therefore not be surprised if Sierra decides to bid on NASA’s next space station funding round independent entirely of the Orbital Reef partnership.
It certainly is assembling all the pieces needed for a station, without any help from Blue Origin.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on July 17, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The white dot on the overview map above marks the location, inside a thirty-mile-wide dune sea, or erg, that sits in the center of the floor of 80-mile-wide Russell Crater.
That erg is interesting in that it appears the dunes get larger and larger as you move from the perimeter to its center. Thus, the dunes in the picture are called mega-dunes, about 200-feet-high. They dwarf the smaller dunes at the erg’s edge.
This picture was taken as part of a long term monitoring program to track the coming and going of seasonal dry ice frost on these dunes. It is summer when this picture was taken, so there is relatively little visible frost, though the bright blue areas in the color strip could possibly be the last remnants from winter. In winter, data suggests the entire surface of these dunes is covered by dry ice frost.
As the location is at 54 degrees south latitude, it likely sits at the northernmost edge of the southern dry ice mantle that in winter covers each of the Martian poles, down to about 60 degrees latitude.
After the Daily Mail in the UK reported that it appeared that Sunita Williams on ISS appeared “gaunt” in recent pictures and might have health issues due to her unexpectedly long stay in space, NASA today issued a denial, stating unequivocally that she “is in good health.”
The pictures used to suggest she is “gaunt” are mostly based on the shape of her face, but this means nothing. Weightlessness shifts things about. The Daily Mail report used the analysis of those photos by a doctor in Seattle.
While the two have put on a positive front in their public comments and interviews, a recent photo tells a different story, according to Dr Vinay Gupta, a pulmonologist and veteran in Seattle. Dr Gupta told DailyMail.com: “What you’re seeing there in that picture is somebody that I think is experiencing the natural stresses of living at a very high altitude, even in a pressurized cabin, for extended periods. Her cheeks appear a bit sunken – and usually it happens when you’ve had sort of total body weight loss,” Dr Gupta added.
“I think what I can discern by her face and her cheeks being sunken in is that [she] has probably been at a significant [calorie] deficit for a while.”
As a general rule, it is considered to be unethical for a doctor to make any diagnosis from a distance based on press reports. Gupta might be right, but more likely he is basing these opinions on very incomplete data. In this case I would generally trust NASA’s denial, especially becauase Williams is a very experienced astronaut who has done previous long missions on ISS.
The space station startup Vast has announced it has now signed an agreement with the Czech government to possibly fly one of its astronauts to the company’s Haven space stations, either the smaller Haven-1 or the full size Haven-2 to follow.
Any future mission with Vast could see Aleš Svoboda, one of 12 reserve astronauts selected by the European Space Agency in November 2022, become the second Czech astronaut. Svoboda has been a focal point for the Czech government’s efforts to stimulate growth in the Czech space industry and inspire the country’s young people to pursue STEM careers, crystallized by the launch of the Czech Journey to Space project in June 2024.
In September 2024 the Czech government had signed a similar agreement with Axiom. Under that agreement, Svoboda would fly to ISS. This new deal opens the possibility he will fly elsewhere.
It is very possible the Czechs want to do both, and are covering their bets by signing both agreements. In either case, no mission dates have been set.
SpaceX today announced its plan to fly the next and sixth orbital test flight of its Starship/Superheavy rocket on November 18th, less than two weeks from today.
The next Starship flight test aims to expand the envelope on ship and booster capabilities and get closer to bringing reuse of the entire system online. Objectives include the booster once again returning to the launch site for catch, reigniting a ship Raptor engine while in space, and testing a suite of heatshield experiments and maneuvering changes for ship reentry and descent over the Indian Ocean.
The success of the first catch attempt demonstrated the design feasibility while providing valuable data to continue improving hardware and software performance. Hardware upgrades for this flight add additional redundancy to booster propulsion systems, increase structural strength at key areas, and shorten the timeline to offload propellants from the booster following a successful catch. Mission designers also updated software controls and commit criteria for the booster’s launch and return.
As noted earlier, the FAA has made it clear that no new license is required since this flight plan is essentially the same as the fifth flight.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on October 18, 2024 issued the first deep space communications license to the private asteroid mining startup company Astroforge for its planned Odin mission to an asteroid.
Asteroid prospecting company AstroForge has been awarded the first-ever commercial license for operating and communicating with a spacecraft in deep space, ahead of its Odin mission that’s set to launch and rendezvous with a near-Earth asteroid in early 2025.
The license, granted by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Oct. 18, pertains specifically to setting up a communication network with radio ground stations on Earth, to enable commands to be sent up to Odin and data to be transmitted back to Earth. In this case, deep space is defined by the International Telecommunications Union as being farther than 2 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Earth.
Other private companies have sent missions to the Moon, but this will be the first to go beyond. Odin will orbit and map the asteroid — not yet chosen — in advance of a larger AstroForge spacecraft, dubbed Vestri, that will land on the asteroid.
One piece of cargo carried by the cargo Dragon to ISS earlier this week is the first cubesat ever to use wood for its side panelling.
Made by researchers in Japan, the tiny satellite weighing just 900g is heading for the International Space Station on a SpaceX mission. It will then be released into orbit above the Earth. Named LignoSat, after the Latin word for wood, its panels have been built from a type of magnolia tree, using a traditional technique without screws or glue.
Researchers at Kyoto University who developed it hope it may be possible in the future to replace some metals used in space exploration with wood. “Wood is more durable in space than on Earth because there’s no water or oxygen that would rot or inflame it,” Kyoto University forest science professor Koji Murata told Reuters news agency. “Early 1900s airplanes were made of wood,” Prof Murata said. “A wooden satellite should be feasible, too.”
The satellite’s frame is still metal, but by using wood for its side panelling the engineers hope to test the feasibility of wood as a in-space construction material.
The Parker Solar Probe is scheduled to complete its last fly-by of Venus on November 6, 2024, passing only 233 miles above the planet’s surface.
The flyby will adjust Parker’s trajectory into its final orbital configuration, bringing the spacecraft to within an unprecedented 3.86 million miles of the solar surface on Dec. 24, 2024. It will be the closest any human made object has been to the Sun.
That close solar approach will occur on December 24, 2024. Whether the spacecraft can survive is the main question, and we won’t find out until three days later, when it sends a signal to confirm its survival. If successful, it will then attempt to repeat that close fly-by at least two more times.
As for the Venus fly-by, the spacecraft will use one instrument to attempt to peer into Venus’s clouds.
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE, later renamed NEOWISE) has ended its fifteen years in orbit, burning up in the atmosphere on November 1, 2024.
In its initial mission it did an infrared survey of the sky, discovering millions of black holes, many of the most luminous galaxies, and numerous brown dwarfs. It was then repurposed to survey the sky for near Earth objects, asteroids that have the potential to impact the Earth, discovering more than two hundred new asteroids while tracking more precisely another 3,000. It did this by repeating its survey over and over so that moving objects could be spotted.
Last night three different rockets took off from three continents.
First, Russia launched two space weather satellites and 53 cubesats, its Soyuz-2 rocket lifting off from its Vostochny spaceport in the far east. The main payload were the two Ionosfera-M satellites, designed to study the Earth’s ionosphere in tandem.
The rocket flew north, over Russia, where its lower stages were dropped into planned drop zones. No word if they crashed near habitable ares.
Next, SpaceX launched an unmanned cargo Dragon to ISS, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage completed its fifth flight, landing safefly back at Cape Canaveral. The capsule is on its fifth flight, and successfully docked with ISS this morning.
Finally, Rocket Lab launched a “confidential commercial” payload under a contract designed to launch very fast after contract signing, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its launchpads in New Zealand.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
108 SpaceX
49 China
13 Russia
12 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 126 to 75, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 108 to 93. Note too that with these launches the world has exceeded 200 launches in 2024, the second time this has ever been done, with the record of 213 launches set last year. This record will almost certainly be broken sometime this month.
Time for this month’s sunspot update. As I have done every month since I started this website in 2010, I am posting NOAA’s most recent update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, adding some additional details to provide context.
In October, following a crash in activity in September, the Sun showed a slight increase the number of sunspots. The increase did not match the drop from the month before, but it brought the activity back up to the level seen during the summer.
» Read more
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The pictures to the right were both compiled from photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, with the bottom annotated to indicate the location of a 2017 supernova that was not visible in the earlier 2005 picture.
In this collage two images of the spiral galaxy NGC 1672 are compared: one showing supernova SN 2017GAX as a small green dot, and the other without. The difference between the images is that both have been created by processing multiple individual Hubble images, each taken to capture a specific wavelength of visible light, and combining them to make a full-colour image. In one of those filtered frames, taken in 2017, the fading supernova is still visible
NGC 1672 is considered a barred spiral galaxy. Located an estimated 52 million light years away, the 2017 supernovae was not the last detected within it. In 2022 a second supernovae occurred. That’s two supernovae within five years. Meanwhile the Milky Way has not seen a supernova in more than four centuries.
After losing its first Mira prototype test plane during a flight in May, the German startup Polaris Spaceplanes has now begun test flights of its replacement, dubbed Mira-2.
With this prototype the company hopes to test its aerospike engine in flight for the first time, leading to the construction of its full scale spaceplane Aurora.
This five-metre-long vehicle is equipped with jet engines for take-off and landing and one of the company’s in-house developed AS-1 aerospike engines for rocket-powered flight.
POLARIS conducted the first three test flights of the MIRA II demonstrator at the Peenemünde Airport on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Over the three flights, the vehicle accumulated a total of 20 minutes of flight time and covered more than 50 kilometres.
All three flights were unmanned, as Mira-2 is relatively small. The company will now install the aerospike engine, with the next flights testing that engine. If successful, it would be the first time ever an aerospike rocket engine has ever flown.
Three Chinese astronauts safely landed in Mongolia today after completing a six month mission on China’s Tiangong-3 space station.
Ye Guangfu, on his second flight, and two rookies, Li Cong and Li Guansu, lifted off on April 25, 2024 at 8:59 am EDT and docked about six-and-a-half hours later. They’ve been aboard the past six months conducting scientific experiments and performing maintenance activities including a space walk.
They landed today, November 3, at 12:24 pm EST at the Dongfeng landing site in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. China is 13 hours ahead of EST, so it was a nighttime landing there at 1:34 am November 4. China’s CGTN television network provided live coverage. Descent and touchdown were captured by infrared cameras.
A new crew has taken over occupancy of Tiangong-3, and has now started its own six month mission.
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.
The Australian government has now issued permits for two different spaceports, making possibly orbital launches at both in the near future.
First the planning minister for the province of South Australia has issued final approval allowing launches at the Southern Launch facility on Australia’s southern coast, though that approval included serious restrictions, such as no rocket launched could be taller than 30 meters. He also placed limitations on the number of launches per year, 36, the amount of noise a launch could make, and added other rules “regarding cultural heritage and native vegetation management.”
The spaceport hopes to complete its first orbital launch by the end of next year. Not surprisingly, the leftists in Green Party opposed the spaceport.
Second, the Australian Space Agency issued a launch license to Gilmour Space at its Bowen spaceport on the eastern coast of Australia, seven months late. This quote from the company’s founder is instructive:
But Mr Gilmour said when he and his brother, James Gilmour, set out to be the first to build a rocket of its kind in Australia almost a decade ago, he never imagined that getting a [launch] permit would be the most difficult part. “In my wildest dreams, I didn’t think it’d take this long,” he said. “I honestly thought the environmental approval [to launch a rocket over the Great Barrier Reef] would take the longest, and we got that well over a year ago.”
The company had originally hoped to launch early this year. It still hopes to do so before the end of 2024.
Japan today successfully launched a military communications satellite on the fourth launch of Mitsubishi’s new H3 rocket.
Liftoff occurred at Japan’s Tanegashima spaceport on the southern end of Japan’s island chain.
This was Japan’s fifth launch in 2024, the most launches it has accomplished in a single year since it completed six in 2018. As such the leader board in the 2024 launch race remains unchanged:
107 SpaceX
49 China
12 Russia
11 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 124 to 74, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world, including American companies, 107 to 91.
According to a report from Bloomberg today and based on anonymous sources, the rocket startup Relativity is experiencing serious cash shortages that threaten its future.
Relativity Space Inc., the privately held US maker of 3D-printed rockets that once soared to a $4.2 billion valuation, is running low on cash, raising questions about the future of its launch business, people familiar with the matter said.
The company has faced challenges raising additional capital, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the matter is confidential. Relativity, which last launched a rocket in March 2023 and has plans to launch its larger Terran R in 2026, hasn’t reached a decision on a path forward.
It is hard to say whether this information is correct. However, the story also had this tidbit that I myself have heard from my own sources:
The company also announced plans to incorporate more traditional manufacturing methods with Terran R, moving away from using 3D printing.
Since from its very founding Relativity touted 3D printing as the wave of the future, claiming its decision to build its rockets entirely in that manner would produce rockets fast and cheaply. That it is no longer doing this suggests that reality was not the same as these visions, and the company discovered that it is better to look for the best way to do each thing rather than try to fit everything into the same mold.
It also appears that the company spent a lot of its capital trying to make 3D printing work, and as a result it is now short of cash.
Click for full resolution graphic.
A new model has now been proposed for explaining how liquid water could have once flowed on Mars and created the many channels and river-like features geologists see today.
This new theory posits that the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, once thicker, fell as snow to bury water ice on the surface near the poles, where that ice then melted from pressure and heat from below to flow underground and then out into lower latitudes.
The paper, led by Planetary Science Institute Research Scientist Peter Buhler, describes how 3.6 billion years ago, carbon dioxide froze out of Mars’ atmosphere and deposited on top of a water ice sheet at the poles, insulating heat emanating from Mars’ interior and increasing the pressure on the ice. This caused roughly half of Mars’ total water inventory to melt and flow across its surface without the need for climatic warming.
The graphic to the right is figure 1 from Buhler’s paper. It shows this process in the south pole, flowing north through Argyre Basin and along various now meandering channels to eventually flow out into the northern lowland plains. In every case Buhler’s model posits the water flowed in “ice-covered rivers” or “ice-covered lakes”, the ice protecting the water so that it could flow as a liquid.
This model confirms once again my impression that the Mars planetary community is increasingly considering glaciers and ice as a major past factor in shaping the planet we see today. This model suggests liquid water under ice, but it still remains possible that ice alone could have done the job.
Click for original image.
Cool image time! The picture to the right, rotated, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on August 29, 2024 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
The camera team labels the primary feature in this picture as “ridges,” but what I see is a strange crater that at first glance appears to be impact-caused, but at closer inspection might be something else entirely.
This unnamed crater is about one mile wide. It is only about fifty feet deep, but sits above the surround landscape by about 200 feet. That high position suggests strongly that this crater was not formed by an impact by is instead a caldera from some sort of volcanic activity, with the splash apron around it simply examples of past magma flows erupting from within.
The ridges inside the crater might be glacial debris, as this location is at 35 degrees south latitude, making near surface ice possible.
» Read more
Boeing’s racist hiring goals in 2024
According to a report from Bloomberg news today, Boeing has now dismantled its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) division, with its head leaving the company.
Staff from Boeing’s DEI office will be combined with another human resources team focused on talent and employee experience, according to people familiar with the matter. Sara Liang Bowen, a Boeing vice president who led the now-defunct department, left the company on Thursday. [emphasis mine]
The highlighted phrase above tells us all we need to know. The focus under Boeing’s new CEO Kelly Ortberg will be “talent and employee experience,” not skin color or gender.
Bowen wrote the following in announcing her dismissal:
It has been the privilege of my lifetime to lead Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the Boeing company these past 5+ years. Our team strived every day to support the evolving brilliance and creativity of our workforce. The team achieved so much – sometimes imperfectly, never easily – and dreamed of doing much more still. [emphasis mine]
As far as I can tell, all that Bowen accomplished was to destroy the reputation of Boeing as a quality manufacturer of aerospace products. Instead, it became a place which hired people based on their race, and didn’t care if they knew the difference between a screwdriver and a forklift. The screen capture to the right comes from the company’s 2024 Boeing Sustainability & Social Impact Report [pdf], which is still online, as is the webpage of Boeing’s DEI division. Both still tout the racist quota goals of this DEI department that forced the company to consider race and gender above talent and experience in its hiring. Hopefully that ugliness will vanish soon as well.
Meanwhile, Boeing union employees on the west coast are about to vote on a third contract proposal, having rejected the previous two and going on strike since mid-September. I suspect the decision above to get rid of this poisonous DEI department will sit well with those union employees, and likely help to encourage them to approve the plan.
