Tag: policy

Having an off day

1:50 pm

To my readers: This is one of those days where I just cannot get up the oomph to write. First, I am becoming bored by my daily “Today’s blacklisted American” column. It is not that the number of people being ruined and harmed by the oppressive thugs of the left has dropped, it is that I am finding that people are becoming desensitized to the oppression. I get the impression that my posts are being skimmed or ignored, because they are merely repeating the same story over and over again.

“Oh, yeah, big deal, another person lost their job because they dared to express an opinion. Call me when something new happens.”

Such a situation I find so depressing words can’t express it. Makes it very hard to work.

Second, I have a bunch of new cool images to post, but I am either waiting for answers from scientists before posting, or I don’t have the mental energy today to work up a post. Sorry. I think I simply need a real day off.

Unless I get energerized later today, you all will simply have to wait until I return in full force on Monday (though if something exciting pops up on the weekend it might get my writing juices flowing sooner).

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China launches military communications satellite

9:48 am

China’s Long March 3B rocket yesterday successfully launched a military communications satellite.

This was China’s eighth government launch since the beginning of July, in a span of only five weeks.

The launch was from an interior spaceport, so the rocket’s strap-on boosters and first stage core landed within China. No word if any landed near or on habitable areas, or if the Chinese were using parachutes or grid fins to control their landing.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

26 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman
3 Rocket Lab

The U.S. still leads China 30 to 26 in the national rankings.

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As thousands of teachers endorse critical race theory, home schooling surges

12:45 pm

What apparently Critical Race Theory sees as education for elementary school kids.
What apparently Critical Race Theory sees as education for
elementary school kids.

In the past few months state legislatures across the country have passed resolutions that ban schools from teaching the Marxist and bigoted program dubbed Critical Race Theory (CRT).

Not surprisingly, the leftists who dominate our school systems have fought back. The very leftist Zinn Education Project immediately created a petition calling for teachers to defy such laws and to continue to teach CRT, which teaches children to hate whites and to give minorities privileged status.

In the two months this petition has been on line almost 6,000 teachers have signed it, with many adding comments of defiance. This one is typical:
» Read more

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China’s Long March 6 launches two military technology test satellites

8:47 am

Using its Long March 6 rocket, China yesterday successfully placed two military technology test satellites into orbit, designed to test “new interference suppression technology for Ka-band mobile communications satellites.”

The launch occurred at one of China’s interior spaceports. No word on whether the rocket’s first stage crashed near habitable area.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

25 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman
3 Rocket Lab

The U.S. still leads China 30 to 25 in the national rankings.

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Details on the Russian movie to be shot on ISS in October

9:13 pm

Link here. The article provides a lot of details about who will fly, who will do what, and who is slated as back-ups if the primary crew of actress and director fail their training. However, I found the description of the movie to be the most interesting thing:

Shipenko revealed the script is still being fine-tuned, but the plot involves a cosmonaut who suffers a cardiac arrest during a spacewalk and, although he survives, he will require surgery to ensure he can handle the Soyuz return to Earth. A female cardiac surgeon, named Zhenya, has to be sent to the ISS to perform the procedure with only a few weeks to prepare for the trip.

Unlike the American space films like Gravity, this story is incredibly well grounded in reality. The Russians have actually experienced examples of station astronauts getting so sick in space that their missions had to be aborted early. In one case it was a prostate infection. In another it was the mental illness of the entire crew.

This story is also comparable to situations that have occurred in Antarctica, a very similar environment to the station. In the early 2000s the doctor in Antarctica had to perform surgery on herself because she had developed cancer. Then in 2016 Buzz Aldrin had to be evacuated due health issues.

If done right, this could not only make a damn good movie, it will also do so by revealing the true dangers of going to space.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Cybersecurity experts want people fired for expressing unpopular opinions on line

1:09 pm

1966 in communist China
Mao’s cultural revolution in 1966, what the leftists
at Respect in Security want for America and the world.

Persecution is now cool! A new project being developed by leftist cybersecurity experts calls for corporations to use their software to identify and fire individuals that their software identifies as having expressed what they define as “offensive” speech online.

Cancel Culture and Big Tech are a match made in hell, as cybersecurity experts call to target the livelihood of internet users who get too edgy online. “The initiative, called Respect in Security, was launched on Tuesday by two cybersecurity experts. According to the founders, several companies have already signed up,” Reclaim The Net reported. “For a lot of people, it’s a no man’s land,” founder Lisa Forte and Red Goat Cyber Security employee told the BBC. “It can feel like the platforms do nothing, the police don’t do a lot, lawyers are expensive and the publicity legal action generates can be negative.”

The BBC reported that co-founder and Trend Micro Vice President Rik Ferguson said “many companies had anti-bullying policies but they tended to focus on internal behaviour.” In what may be a reference to his Respect in Security program, he wrote a few weeks ago: “Inside my ‘Projects’ email folder resides a subfolder called ‘Kill Trolls’ and it is now only a couple of weeks away from becoming a real thing (sadly not with that name).”

Free speech advocates concerned about Ferguson and Forte’s work may have good reason to be. Forte explained her clear fix for people saying offensive statements via the internet: “The best solution we have, if the culprit is identifiable, is to approach their employer.” [emphasis mine]

It is bad enough that the big social media companies — Google, Facebook, Twitter — are routinely banning conservatives for expressing opinions or even facts they don’t like. Now the storm troopers above want to extend the blacklisting to get those same people fired for daring to speak their mind publicly. From another story:
» Read more

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Gil Levin passes away

9:48 am

Gil Levin, a instrument project scientist for one of the science experiments on the Mars Viking landers in the 1970s, has passed away at 97.

Levin deserves special mention because he believed for years that his experiment, called “labeled release,” had possibly found evidence of life.

Dr. Levin’s experiment employed a nine-foot arm to scoop Martian soil into a container, where it was treated with a solution containing radioactive carbon nutrients. Monitors detected the release of radioactive gas, which Dr. Levin interpreted as evidence of metabolism.

“Gil, that’s life,” Straat said when they saw the results.

The findings held true for both Viking 1 and Viking 2, which took samples from different regions of the planet. Other experiments aboard the Viking, however, used different methods to conclude that Martian soil did not contain carbon, an element found in all living things.

Dr. Levin stood by his findings, but top NASA scientists disagreed, saying that the response he observed was the result of inorganic chemical responses, not biological processes. “Soon thereafter,” Dr. Levin told the Johns Hopkins University School of Engineering Magazine last year, “I gave a talk at the National Academy of Sciences saying we detected life, and there was an uproar. Attendees shouted invectives at me. They were ready to throw shrimp at me from the shrimp bowl. One former adviser said, ‘You’ve disgraced yourself, and you’ve disgraced science.’”

I met Levin once and interviewed him several times. With amazing grace and cheerfulness he always emphasized that his results needed to be confirmed, and there was certainly room for skepticism, but to reject them outright was not how the scientific method worked.

Levin however was never awarded another NASA project, essentially blackballed because of his 1970s claims, even though later research hinted at the possibility that he may have been right.

R.I.P. Gil Levin. Though the overall data we have gotten from Mars in the half century since still favors a non-life explanation for his experiment, the uncertainty remains quite large. He could have been right.

More important than his uncertain result, however, was his dedication to the proper scientific method, where you let the data speak for itself and never dismiss any possibility if that is what the data shows you.

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Chinese pseudo-private rocket fails during launch

2:23 pm

A launch attempt by the pseudo-private Chinese company iSpace failed today, the second failure in a row for this company following a success.

A Hyperbola 1 rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan launch base at 3:39 a.m. EDT (0739 GMT; 3:39 p.m. Beijing time), China’s government-run Xinhua news agency said. Xinhua, which described the launch as a “flight test,” said the rocket exhibited “abnormal performance” after liftoff. Officials did not immediately specify when during the flight the rocket failed.

The news agency said a satellite carried by the rocket “did not enter orbit as scheduled.” Chinese officials did not identify the payload lost on the mission.

This is the second launch failure in a row, following the first successful orbital launch in July 2019.

The rocket is made of four solid-fueled stages, which means it most certainly is using military tecnology and is being closely supervised by the Chinese government. ISpace is one of about four such pseudo-private Chines companies. In each case, China is allowing private Chinese capital to finance the development of these rockets, for use both by the Chinese government as well as sale to customers (but only with the government’s approval and control).

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Today’s blacklisted American: 65,000 Americans censored by social media

12:03 pm

The Bill of Rights cancelled by Google, Facebook, and Twitter
The Bill of Rights cancelled by
Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

The new dark age of silencing According to the legal team for former president Donald Trump, almost 65,000 people have submitted examples of censorship by the social media companies Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and the lawyers have amended Trump’s the lawsuit to add those individuals to it.

According to the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), Trump’s July 7 lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter, and Google is adding ”additional censorship experiences” from some of the nearly 65,000 people who submitted them to the institute. ”Late last night, Amended Complaints were filed in the Big Tech lawsuits against Facebook, Inc., Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter, Inc., Jack Dorsey, Google LLC, and Sundar Pichai,” AFPI said in a July 28 statement.

“Since the initial filing on July 7, 2021, nearly 65,000 American people have submitted their stories of censorship through America First Policy Institute’s (AFPI) Constitutional Litigation Partnership (CLP) at TakeOnBigTech.com,” AFPI added.

» Read more

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Two flybys of Venus set by two spacecraft on August 9th and 10th

8:54 am

Two European planetary probes, one launched to study the inner solar enviroment and the second to study Mercury, are going to fly past Venus only 33 hours apart on August 9th and 10th.

Solar Orbiter, a partnership between ESA and NASA, will fly by Venus on 9 August with a closest approach of 7995 km at 04:42 UTC. Throughout its mission it makes repeated gravity assist flybys of Venus to get closer to the Sun, and to change its orbital inclination, boosting it out of the ecliptic plane, to get the best – and first – views of the Sun’s poles.

BepiColombo, a partnership between ESA and JAXA, will fly by Venus at 13:48 UTC on 10 August at an altitude of just 550 km. BepiColombo is on its way to the mysterious innermost planet of the solar system, Mercury. It needs flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury itself, together with the spacecraft’s solar electric propulsion system, to help steer into Mercury orbit against the immense gravitational pull of the Sun.

The two spacecraft will zip past a different side of Venus. For a variety of reasons, the imagery gathered will not of high resolution, though both spacecraft will gather data that will eventually be correlated with similar data being gathered by Japan’s Akatsuki probe, in orbit around Venus since 2015.

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Nauka shook up ISS more than first revealed

9:50 pm

According to new reporting, when the new Russian module Nauka unexpectedly began firing its engines, it rotated the International Space Station far more than first revealed, requiring a much more complicated effort to bring the station back to its correct orientation.

Zebulon Scoville, the flight director at NASA mission control in Houston, revealed that the 45 degrees that was initially reported as the amount ISS rotated was incorrect.

According to Scoville, the event has “been a little incorrectly reported.” He said that after Nauka incorrectly fired up, the station “spun one-and-a-half revolutions — about 540 degrees — before coming to a stop upside down. The space station then did a 180-degree forward flip to get back to its original orientation,” according to the report.

Scoville also shared that this was the first time that he has ever declared a “spacecraft emergency.”

It appears that though the station spun far more than first reported, the rate of rotation was still relatively slow, so it apparently did no harm to the station.

Scoville also revealed that, based on the data on hand during the event, it appeared Nauka was also trying to undock itself from the station. Mission controllers tried to counter this by firing engines on a Russian Progress freighter as well as on the Zvezda module.

Had Nauka’s engines had not stopped firing (for unknown reasons, though probably because they ran out of fuel), there was the real chance the accelerations could have shaken the station apart. Moreover, that other engines were brought into play suggests that the Russians not only did not know why Nauka’s engines fired, they had at the time no way to shut them down, and were thus forced to improvise other actions to try to save the increasingly dangerous situation.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Biracial physician demoted by hospital for criticizing the left

12:54 pm

What apparently passes for medical treatment at the Hennepin Healthcare system
Beliefs apparently required of doctors at the Hennepin Healthcare system

The new dark age of silencing: Tara Gustilo, a biracial physician from the Philippines, found herself quickly demoted from her position as chairwoman of the OB-GYN department for the Hennepin Healthcare system in Minnesota when she dared to post on social media commentary against the Marxist and bigoted Black Lives Matter organization and the equally bigoted critical race theory being pushed by leftist educators in the public schools.
» Read more

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Zhurong continues south, inspecting dunes

10:40 am

Zhurong's travels as of July 31, 2021

The Chinese science team for their Zhurong Mars rover released new images yesterday, including a map showing the rover’s present position.

The new images and location has confirmed that the white streaks seen in orbital pictures are small dunes of sand blown by the thin Martian wind.

The map to the right, created using their map but annotated and providing a wider context, shows their present location relative to the lander and surrounding terrain. So far the rover has traveled about 1,900 feet, about 1,000 feet per month. Since it seems to be operating as planned, I expect China will extend the mission once it completes its nominal three-month tour in about two weeks.

At that travel pace there is much of interest that is within the rover’s range. I expect they are heading south partly because this brings them closer to their original landing site, which is an area they probably studied at length before landing. Whether they head to the largest crater, visible only partly on the image’s south edge, remains unclear.

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Russia offers conflicting causes for Nauka engine firing

9:34 am

Russian officials have now suggested two explanations for the accidently ignition of the engines on the new Nauka module to ISS, neither of which appears to have involved any real investigation.

Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the space station’s Russian segment, blamed the incident on a “short-term software failure.” In a statement released Friday by the Russian space agency Roscosmos, Solovyov said because of the failure, a direct command to turn on the lab’s engines was mistakenly implemented.

He added the incident was “quickly countered by the propulsion system” of another Russian component at the station and “at the moment, the station is in its normal orientation” and all its systems “are operating normally.”

Roscosmos director Dmitry Rogozin later Friday suggested that “human factor” may have been at play. “There was such euphoria (after Nauka successfully docked with the space station), people relaxed to some extent,” Rogozin said in a radio interview. “Perhaps one of the operators didn’t take into account that the control system of the block will continue to adjust itself in space. And it determined a moment three hours after (the docking) and turned on the engines.” [emphasis mine]

So, was it human error? Or was it the software programming? Or both?

No matter what the specific cause, these conflicting stories, thrown out in almost an offhand manner, demonstrate that the real fundamental cause was the terrible, sloppy, and error-prone quality control systems at Roscosmos and all the aerospace companies it has taken over since the Putin administration consolidated Russia’s aerospace industry into a single government-run corporation.

These kinds of failures seem to happen with Russia now repeatedly. From launch aborts to launch failures to corruption in contracting to corruption in engine construction to plain simple sabotage, mistakes and errors and poor planning and dishonesty seem to hound their space effort at every level. Thank God Americans no longer have to fly on a Soyuz capsule, though one American on board ISS is still scheduled to come home on one.

Without competition and freedom, there is no pressure in Russia to improve, to improvise, to rethink, and to clean house when a management gets stale or corrupt. Instead, operations stultify and develop dry rot. They can’t see problems or even fix them efficiently. If anything, management circles the wagons to protect itself, while often deliberately ignoring the problems.

Rocket science is hard. It can quickly kill people when done poorly.

I think it will be a great relief to end this partnership. And the sooner the better.

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GAO rejects protests by Blue Origin and Dynectics over lunar lander award

12:50 am

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) today rejected the protests by Blue Origin and Dynectics against the award by NASA of its manned lunar lander contract to SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft.

In denying the protests, GAO first concluded that NASA did not violate procurement law or regulation when it decided to make only one award. NASA’s announcement provided that the number of awards the agency would make was subject to the amount of funding available for the program. In addition, the announcement reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all. In reaching its award decision, NASA concluded that it only had sufficient funding for one contract award. GAO further concluded there was no requirement for NASA to engage in discussions, amend, or cancel the announcement as a result of the amount of funding available for the program. As a result, GAO denied the protest arguments that NASA acted improperly in making a single award to SpaceX.

GAO next concluded that the evaluation of all three proposals was reasonable, and consistent with applicable procurement law, regulation, and the announcement’s terms.

Finally, GAO agreed with the protesters that in one limited instance NASA waived a requirement of the announcement for SpaceX. Despite this finding, the decision also concludes that the protesters could not establish any reasonable possibility of competitive prejudice arising from this limited discrepancy in the evaluation.

This decision will likely allow NASA to proceed with the contract, and for SpaceX to begin work on the revisions it will need to make to Starship to make it a lunar lander.

The decision also puts companies like Blue Origin and Dynectics on notice: You need to prove you have the goods, or you won’t win customers. Commit some of your own funds to research and development, start building actual prototypes you can test, and the world will begin to beat a path to your door.

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Arianespace successfully completes first Ariane 5 launch in almost a year

11:23 pm

Arianespace today successfully completed its first Ariane 5 launch since August 2020, placing in orbit two commercial communications satellites.

The long gap in launches occurred because of a vibration issue discovered during that August 2020 launch durng the release of the rocket’s two fairing halves.

Engineers introduced modifications to the Ariane 5’s payload fairing, or nose cone, to reduce vibrations imparted on the satellites during separation of the shroud, which protects payloads during the first few minutes of flight through the atmosphere. Ground teams will analyze data from the rocket to make sure the changes reduced the vibrations.

Another launch is scheduled for September, followed next by the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in either November or December. The results from today’s launch as well as the one in September will determine if the Webb launch will go forward on time.

These issues with Ariane 5, delays imposed by the company in fear of the Wuhan flu, and other launch problems with Arianespace’s Vega rocket, has meant that this is only its second launch in 2021, a pace that is below its pace for most of the last decade. Whether the company can recover and pick up the pace before the end of the year will depend on what they learn during today’s launch.

With only two launches total, Europe’s Arianespace remains off the leader board in the 2021 launch race:

24 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman
3 Rocket Lab

The U.S. lead over China in the national rankings remains 30 to 24.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Town tries to silence Trump supporter; he sues

2:05 pm

Banned for being conservative
No first amendment rights in Long Beach, New York!

The modern dark age: Because the town of Long Beach, New York has forced a Trump supporter to hide his car, festooned with pro-Trump and conservative messages, he is suing that town for $25 million for denying him is first amendment rights.

“I believe the city is trying to silence me because I’m pro-Trump,” [Michael Wasserman] told The Post. The 62-year-old entrepreneur has become known in the area for plastering his home — along with his Porsche and Jeep — with a rotating variety of political flags and stickers.

Now he has filed a $25 million federal suit — against the City of Long Beach, the chief of police, the city manager and specific police officers — after officials forced him to remove the flags on his cars.

The town claims they are a violation of an ordinance stating that “[No] sign shall be erected, affixed or maintained within the perimeter of any … public street or public property.” Wasserman parks his car on a public street outside his home.

“They’re bending and massaging the ordinance to fit the crime,” Wasserman told The Post. “This is a blatant attempt to silence me.”

The picture above shows Wasserman leaning on his car, with his home behind him, also covered with flags and political banners.

The city claims they are simply enforcing a law that forbids signage without permission on public streets. Yet, how are the signs on Wasserman’s car any different then every bumper sticker you see? They are not, and this is where Wasserman’s claim that it is pure political oppression seems confirmed.

Wasserman’s case is further reinforced by the treatment he gets generally in this blue-state New York town:
» Read more

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Apollo: When Americans last did some real exploring

1:02 pm

The journey of Apollo 15 on the Moon
Click for full image.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the landing of Apollo 15 on the Moon. To commemorate that event the science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) today published some orbital images that capture the astronauts’ travels while on the Moon. The picture to the right, reduced to post here, outlines in oblique view their various excusions to the edge of Hadley Rille and the foot of a mountain dubbed Hadley Delta. As they note,

While Apollo 15 was the fourth mission to land a crew successfully on the lunar surface, it still pioneered many new technologies and had many firsts.

Some of the technologies developed for Apollo 15 included new suits, which were more flexible and had longer life support capabilities, as well as the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), a rover capable of speeds up to 15 km / hour. With these advancements, astronauts Commander David (Dave) Scott and Lunar Module Pilot James (Jim) Irwin were able to travel more than eight times the distance traveled during the previous mission, for a total of over 25 km.

All told, astronauts Dave Scott and Jim Irwin spent more than 18 hours exploring the lunar surface on three scouting trips, covering 15.5 miles. During all those excursions their only protection from the harsh lunar environment was that thin spacesuit. In addition, if their rover broke down a walk back to the lunar module would become a race against suffocation.

And even then, they still had to get that lunar module off the ground, rendezvous and dock with the Apollo 15 command module, and then get that module back to Earth safely.
» Read more

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United Kingdom passes comprehensive spaceflight regulations

10:39 am

Capitalism in space: As required by the Outer Space Treaty as well as to lay a framework for commercial and private space launches from within the United Kingsom, the UK this week passed new comprehensive spaceflight regulations that appear modeled closely after already existing regulations in the United States.

From the government’s press release:

The legislation provides the framework to regulate the UK space industry and enable launches to take place from British soil for the very first time. It will unlock a potential £4 billion of market opportunities over the next decade, creating thousands of jobs and benefiting communities right across the UK.

This also puts the UK in a unique position as the first country in Europe able to launch spacecraft and satellites from home soil. This could lead to better monitoring of climate change, as well as improved data for satellite navigation systems, improving journeys right here on the ground, too.

The full law can be read here. It is long, so I have not reviewed it entirely, but it does seem to be closely modeled after several U.S. laws, including the 2004 Space Amendments Act that presently guides FAA regulation and licensing of commercial space launches. The UK even gave its own Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) the same job the FAA has in the U.S.

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Atomic oxygen in Mars’ atmosphere, as seen by Al-Amal

12:06 pm

Oxygen distribution on Mars

The UAE’s Al-Amal Mars orbiter on July 19, 2021 released a new spectroscopic image, showing the global distribution of atomic oxygen in the Martian upper atmosphere.

The Emirates Ultraviolet Spectrometer (EMUS) mapped the distribution of atomic oxygen in the planet’s upper atmosphere, showing a dense patch emerging from the nightside into the new day.

The photo to the right, cropped and reduced to post here, shows this.

Over the next two years, covering one single Martian year, Al-Amal will monitor the distribution of this oxygen to see how it fluctuations from season to season, as well as from day to day. Gather this information will help the theorists untangle the past atmospheric history of Mars.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Democrat endorses racial discrimination and press censorship aimed at whites

11:36 am

Discriminated against by Chicago Democrats
Eagerly discriminated against by Democrats

Blacklists and segregation are back and the Democrats have got ’em: Lori Lightfoot, the Democratic Party mayor of Chicago, recently and enthusiastically defended her past racial disciminatory policy of refusing to give any one-on-one interviews to white reporters, saying she intends to do it again.

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she would “absolutely” grant interviews only to journalists of color again after she drew waves of backlash earlier in the year when she announced the policy.

“I would absolutely do it again. I’m unapologetic about it because it spurred a very important conversation, a conversation that needed to happen, that should have happened a long time ago,” the Democrat said on a segment of the New York Times’s podcast Sway, released on Monday.

“Here is the bottom line for me: To state the obvious, I’m a black woman mayor,” she said. “I’m the mayor of the third-largest city in the country. Obviously, I have a platform, and it’s important to me to advocate on things that I believe are important. Going back to why I ran — to disrupt the status quo. The media is critically important to our democracy. … The media is in a time of incredible upheaval and disruption, but our City Hall press corps looks like it’s 1950 or 1970.”

» Read more

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India officially delays launch of its next lunar rover to ’22

9:47 am

The new colonial movement: India has now officially delayed the launch of its next lunar rover, Chandrayaan-3, to the third quarter of 2022.

Chandrayaan-3 was planned to demonstrate India’s capability of soft landing on a celestial body, with the rover then communicating with Earth via the existing orbiter from Chandrayaan-2. The orbiter has an estimated lifespan of seven years. The third mission was announced months after the Vikram lander aboard Chandrayaan-2 crash-landed on the lunar surface just 2.1 km from its destination in September 2019. Chandrayaan- 3 was initially scheduled for late 2020 or early 2021, but the disruption caused by the pandemic affected the schedule.

The Wuhan flu panic has essentially shut down India’s entire space program for more than a year. Not only has the country only done one launch so far in 2021, far less than expected, it has also had to delay its manned space program by a year, as well as the launch of its own new smallsat rocket.

The delay in launches, including that smallsat rocket, is likely losing India customers in the commercial market, especially because the private rocket companies in the U.S. have continued to launch with almost no delays. If India doesn’t get off the ground soon its rocket industry will be seriously damaged in a way that might take years to recover.

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China’s Long March 2D rocket launches earth observation satellite

9:39 am

China today successfully used its Long March 2D rocket to launch an earth observation satellite into orbit.

The launch was from one of China’s interior spaceports, so the expendable first stage and fairings landed within China. No word on whether they landed uncontrolled or used the parachutes or grid fins to control the landing.

The leaders in the 2021 launch race:

24 China
20 SpaceX
12 Russia
3 Northrop Grumman
3 Rocket Lab

The U.S. still leads China 30 to 24 in the national rankings.

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Nauka finally docks with ISS

9:21 am

ISS configuration with Nauka added
The configuration of the Russian portion of ISS with
Nauka and the as-yet launched docking hub.

This morning the new fullsize module to ISS, Nauka, finally docked with the station, ending a week of tension because of issues with its engines.

The docking was not without issue, with Russian cosmonauts noting that Nauka wasn’t on the correct course less than an hour before docking; however, a retro burn quickly corrected the issue. After also troubleshooting an issue with the TORU manual docking system, Nauka successfully docked in automated fashion to the Zvezda service module’s nadir port at 09:29 EDT / 13:29 UTC, marking the first major expansion to the Russian segment for over 20 years.

They will now begin a series of eleven spacewalks to outfit the module. This includes installing a new European-built robot arm and transferring an airlock and radiator on a different module that were originally built to be attached to Nauka and have been waiting eleven years for its much delayed arrival.

In November Russia will then launch a small docking hub module that will dock with Nauka and provide the docking ports that were lost when the Piers module was detached earlier this week (thus allowing Nauka to dock). This new docking hub is also critical, because it will allow Russia to limit dockings to the aft port on Zvezda, which has serious structural stress issues and must be treated gently to prevent further hull cracks and air leaks.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Twitter bans all election audit accounts in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin

12:48 pm

Liberty and freedom banned
Twitter’s goal: Only Democrats can have freedom of speech.
Photo credit: William Zhang

The new dark age of silencing: In a single purge Twitter yesterday banned all the accounts of all election audits going on in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin.

Earlier today Twitter permanently suspended all nine of the official ‘Audit War Room’ accounts from it’s platform. The accounts were a main source for breaking updates and were banned as part of big tech’s continued attempt to shield the public from the stunning revelations being found regarding the fraudulent 2020 election.

Unsurprisingly, Twitter provided no reason for the suspensions. [emphasis mine]

Note the highlighted sentence. Twitter is no longer even pretending that it is banning these accounts because of some vague “community standard” that each violated. No, Twitter banned them simply because it is possible that the election audits going on in these states might actually uncover evidence of election fraud, and to allow honest and real news reporting can no longer be allowed, if that reporting might threaten the dominant leftist agenda and the Democratic Party politicians who are imposing it.
» Read more

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July 27, 2021 Zimmerman Space Show podcast

10:12 am

The podcast of my two-hour appearance last night on The Space Show with David Livingston is now available here.

Thank you to David and tor everyone who called or emailed questions. Twas a very good show, to my mind. It also allowed me hone my verbal description of my new book, Conscious Choice. When I finish a book, I tend initially to get buried in the details in describing it in interviews. This appearance allowed me to get an idea on how to talk about the book quickly, in summary. I think it went well, and will certainly get better with future appearances.

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Today’s blacklisted American: Tenured professor fired, given no due process, because one student didn’t like what he was doing

11:46 am

The Bill of Rights cancelled at Berea College
No first amendment allowed at Berea College!

Persecution is now cool! The administration at Berea College, a Christian university in Kentucky, fired tenured professor Dave Porter because one student complained about a research survey he was conducting.

Porter’s offense was to have done a survey of attitudes on campus. One student claimed that the survey was a retaliation against her for having filed a Title IX complaint. Writes Porter, “The campus was quickly polarized, and the administration saw a crisis looming. Apparently, the dean had received information from a former student that current students were fearful of attending my classes. There was no investigation and suggestions of mediation or compromise were squelched by the dean’s claim that I was ‘unrepentant and unapologetic.’” [emphasis mine]

More details in this essay Porter himself wrote:
» Read more

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FCC tightens rules for giving grants to broadband companies

8:51 am

The FCC under the Biden administration has informed the companies who obtained subsidies to encourage broadband access in rural areas that the money can only be spent in those areas, not on infrastructure improvements in facilities located in regions that already have good internet access.

The Federal Communications Commission told SpaceX and other companies on Monday that the billions in rural broadband subsidies it doled out last year can’t be used in already connected areas like “parking lots and well-served urban areas,” citing complaints. The commission, in an effort to “clean up” its subsidy auction program, offered the companies a chance to rescind their funding requests from areas that already have service.

The companies that got the subsidies must do the work to determine they qualify for the money, wrote Michael Janson, director of the FCC’s Rural Broadband Task Force, in a letter addressed to SpaceX’s finance director David Finlay. Similar letters, first reported by Bloomberg, were sent to other recipients of the commission’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, a $9.2 billion auction to expand broadband into rural areas that lack or have no service.

The news reports I’ve seen of this story have all been from the generally leftwing press, and have been written to hammer SpaceX. No matter. This program is rife with corruption and the misuse of taxpayer money. SpaceX doesn’t need the nearly billion dollar subsidy it got, or if it does need the billion, it should get it from private investment. As should all the other companies getting cash in this program.

Sadly, the Biden administration does not appear interested in ending the program. Instead, I get the sense what it really wants to do is send the cash to its own cronies, instead of the cronies favored by the Trump adminstration. Thus, do not be surprised if Blue Origin’s as-yet unbuilt Kuiper constellation starts to be a recipient of funds, even as the money is cut from SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.

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An astrophysicist explains cosmology’s theoretical failures

8:37 am

Link here. The astrophysicist, Paul Sutter, does a very nice job of outlining the conundrum that has been causing astrophysicists to tear their hair out for the past decade-plus.

In the two decades since astronomers discovered dark energy, we’ve come upon a little hitch: Measurements of the expansion rate of the universe (and so its age) from both the CMB [cosmic microwave background] and supernovas have gotten ever more precise, but they’re starting to disagree. We’re not talking much; the two methods are separated by only 10 million or 20 million years in estimating the 13.77-billion-year history of the universe. But we’re operating at such a level of precision that it’s worth talking about.

If anything, this failure for two measurements of data spanning billions of light years — which is billions in both time and space — is a perfect illustration of the uncertainty of science. Astrophysicists are trying to come up with answers based on data that is quite thin, with many gaps in knowledge, and carries with it many assumptions. It therefore is actually surprising that these two numbers agree as well as they do.

Sutter, being in the CMB camp, puts most of the blame for this failure on the uncertainty of what we know about supernovae. He could very well be right. The assumptions about supernovae used to measure the expansion rate of the universe are many. There is also a lot of gaps in our knowledge, including a full understanding of the process that produces supernovae.

Sutter however I think puts too much faith in theoretical conclusions of the astrophysics community that have determined the age of the universe based on the CMB. The uncertainties here are as great. Good scientists should remain skeptical of this as well. Our knowledge of physics is still incomplete. Physicists really don’t know all the answers, yet.

In the end, Sutter however does pin down the biggest problem in cosmology:

The “crisis” is a good excuse to keep writing papers, because we’ve been stumped by dark energy for over two decades, with a lot of work and not much understanding. In a sense, many cosmologists want to keep the crisis going, because as long as it exists, they have something to talk about other than counting down the years to the next big mission.

In other words, the discussion now is sometimes less about science and theories and cosmology, but instead about funding and career promotion. What a shock!

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Bezos offers to waive $2 billion in payments to get lunar lander contract

5:57 pm

In an open letter to NASA administrator Bill Nelson, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos offered to waive $2 billion in payments should NASA decide to switch its contract for building the manned lunar lander contract from SpaceX to the Blue Origin team, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.

Blue Origin and its industry partners ⁠— including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper ⁠— bid $6 billion to design and build a competing landing system. After SpaceX won the award, Blue Origin’s team and Dynetics, the third competitor for a NASA contract, filed protests with the Government Accountability Office. The GAO is due to rule on those protests by Aug. 4.

In his letter to Nelson, Bezos revisits the issues laid out in Blue Origin’s protest and complains that NASA “chose to confer a multi-year, multibillion-dollar head start to SpaceX” in the Human Landing System competition. He noted that NASA gave SpaceX a chance to revise its bid to fit NASA’s financial needs, and that Blue Origin wasn’t given a similar opportunity. “That was a mistake, it was unusual, and it was a missed opportunity,” Bezos wrote. “But it is not too late to remedy.”

Bezos then offered to waive all payments in the 2021-2023 fiscal years, up to $2 billion, “to get the program back on track right now.” He said that would be in addition to the $1 billion in corporate contributions that was previously pledged.

The article notes there may be some legal issues blocking such an offer. I also wonder what Blue Origins partners think about this. Has Bezos discussed it with them? Is he offering to cover their profits as well?

We must also be cognizant of one important detail: The Blue Origin team’s proposal lost the bid largely because was ranked below SpaceX’s for both financial and technical reaosns. Even more important, that team’s lander does yet not exist, even in prototype. No significant work has been done. And Blue Origin itself has so far failed to launch anything into orbit, with its orbital rocket New Glenn two years behind schedule. None of this inspires confidence.

SpaceX meanwhile has been test flying its Starship lander in repeated flight tests, demonstrating its capabilities.

Consider this bidding war from a custoner’s perspective. Blue Origin has yet to prove it can build what it promises. SpaceX is already doing so. And it bid less as well.

On August 4th the GAO will rule on the protests of both losers, Blue Origin and Dynetics. Anything can happen, but I strongly expect them to rule in favor of NASA and SpaceX.

And even if they do rule that the contract must be rebid, the bottom line remains: Blue Origin has got to stop trying to win its contracts in the courts, and finally start build the orbital spacecraft and rockets it has been promising for years. I have every faith it can be done. Bezos just has to get his company focused once again in doing so.

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