Tag: policy

Idiocracy has arrived

1:54 pm

Sheila Jackson-Lee:
Sheila Jackson-Lee: “The Moon is made up
mostly of gases!””

Over the last few days the conservative press has been having a field day making justifiable fun of a number of Democrats and leftists for exhibiting incredible scientifict ignorance, an ignorance so profound as to be mind-boggling.

First, after the unusual 4.8 magnitude earthquake centered in New Jersey on April 5th, a Green Party senate candidate in New Jersey, Christina Amira Khalil, immediately tweeted, “I experienced my first earthquake in NJ. We never get earthquakes. The climate crisis is real.” The mocking on X was so great she quickly deleted the tweet.

Then, in an incredibly embarrassing segment of the television show, The View, one host, Sunny Hostin, showed off her complete lack of any scientific knowledge when she claimed that the earthquake, the solar eclipse, and even the normal arrival of the cicadas every seventeen years (which she thought happened every hundred-plus years) was evidence that climate change was real.

Finally, to top off this stream of utter empty-headiness, during an eclipse event in Texas, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee gave a speech of such stunning incompetency and lack of knowledge you have to wonder how she can figure out how to put on her clothes each day. This quote has been most often used to ridicule her:
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China successfully tests new propulsion system for satellites

10:01 am

The state-run Chinese press today touted the successful use of a new “cold-propulsion system” on the Tiandu-2 test satellite launched into lunar orbit with its Queqiao-2 relay communications satellite.

The cold propulsion system recently provided high-precision orbital attitude control for the satellite during lunar orbit, marking the first successful application of the liquid ammonia cold air micro-propulsion system in the field of deep-space exploration.

The storage tank is an important component of satellite propulsion systems. As a pressure component, it requires not only high precision of forming and no leakage, but also good anti-fatigue performance, allowing for repeated fuel filling and discharge.

The article touts the tank so much because it was 3D-printed, making it the first such tank sent into space by China.

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Angara launch scrubbed for the second day in a row

9:52 am

Technical issues early this morning caused Russia to scrub, for the second day in a row, the first launch of its new Angara-A5 heavy-lift rocket from its Vostochny spaceport in the far east of Russia.

The first attempt to launch the Angara-A5 rocket from the Vostochny spaceport on Tuesday was canceled about two minutes before the scheduled liftoff due to a failure of the pressurization system of the oxidizer tank in the central block [the core stage] of the rocket.

The second attempted launch Wednesday was also aborted by the automatic safety system, which registered a flaw in the engine start control mechanism, said Yuri Borisov, head of Russia’s state-controlled space corporation Roscosmos. He added that the failure was most likely rooted in a programming error.

They intend to try again tomorrow.

Angara has been under development for about two decades. This launch, which carries a dummy payload, will be the fifth launch of Angara, though the first of of the heavy-lift A5 configuration since 2014. In 2019 vibration issues were discovered that caused a major delay in its development. Of the previous four launches, only one carried an actual payload into orbit. All the others carried dummy payloads, with one test launch failing.

Russia needs the Angara-A5 rocket if it is going to build its own space station, because it no longer has the Proton rocket to launch modules. It also needs to get its Vostochny spaceport up and running, because its long term access to Baikonur in Kazakhstan is increasingly questionable.

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Japan to sign deal with NASA to fly two Japanese astronauts to Moon

9:34 am

According to story in the Japanese press yesterday, a deal between Japan and NASA will be signed next week whereby Japan will have two astronauts go on Moon missions in exchange for providing cargo to the Lunar Gateway station as well as a manned lunar rover.

The report today is unclear whether those Japanese astronauts will land on the Moon, but I expect they will. The rover project is being led by Toyota. It will include a airtight cabin where spacesuits will not be necessary and passengers can also sleep, allowing for very long exploratory traverses from the landing site.

Reports of this deal have been appearing in the press since 2022, when NASA said it would involve flying one Japanese astronaut to the Moon. In December 2023 it was reported that the deal would be signed within a month. It is now April. It appears the extended negotiations have gotten Japan a second astronaut Moon walker.

NASA’s Artemis program is beginning to shape up as an international program for getting almost everyone to the Moon but Americans. I am exaggerating, but I think in the future Americans will find it easier to go on a private mission to the Moon than depend on NASA, especially because of all the international deals NASA will have to honor.

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Turkey to join China’s lunar base program

9:02 am

Turkey yesterday announced that it is applying to join China’s program to build a lunar base on the Moon, dubbed the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), becoming the ninth nation in that partnership.

Those nations are Azerbaijan, Belarus, Egypt, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, and Venezuela. In addition, another nine academic organizations of one kind or another have signed on.

Interestingly, Turkey’s government apparently decided to partner with China after it flew its own astronaut on Axiom’s AX-3 mission to ISS in January, flying in a SpaceX Dragon capsule launched by SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Previously it had also signed a deal with Sierra Space to participate in both its Dream Chaser and Orbital Reef station.

This new agreement suggests the present instability of international politics has forced it to go to its very powerful neighbors. Or maybe Turkey is signing on with everyone, attempting to burn the candle at both ends.

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What are Israel’s strategic military goals with its latest pull back from Gaza?

12:33 pm

Hamas vs Israel
Even the Arabs recognize these facts.
Courtesy of Doug Ross.

Over the weekend numerous news reports announced that Israel had suddenly pulled almost all its troops out of the Gaza strip, apparently abandoning its plan to finish off the last four battalions of Hamas that were hiding out in the southern town of Rafah.

Despite denials by Israel’s military and the Netanyahu government, on the surface it appeared Israel had bowed to pressure from the Biden administration to cancel its invasion of Rafah and instead break off its military offense against Hamas.

I suspect things are much more complicated, and could instead be — as some Israel officials claimed — a tactical maneuver intended to make that military invasion of Rafah more effective while reducing the large number of civilian deaths anticipated because of the more than a million Gazan refugees that have been crammed into that southern city.

The nature of the withdrawal reveals much about its goal:
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Argentina demands right to inspect Chinese antenna facility

9:45 pm

The Argentina government of Javier Milei is now demanding the right to inspect a Chinese antenna facility that was established in Argentina in 2014 and began operating in 2017 under a 50-year-lease.

Under the agreement between the two nations, 10% “of the resources in the base must be utilized by Argentina.” However, China has been operating the facility unsupervised from the beginning. Likely built to support China’s space program, manned and planetary, U.S. officials have also suggested it is being used for military purposes, a possibility that cannot be dismissed since all of China’s space program falls under the supervision of the People’s Liberation Army.

Milei apparently wants a hand in its operation, or at least a much clearer idea of what it is doing. It is very possible he will even shut it down if he is not satisfied with the answers he gets.

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Mitsubishi joins private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station

8:24 am

The Japanese big space company Mitsubishi has now joined the private consortium building the Starlab commercial space station for NASA, teaming up with Voyager Space and Airbus.

At this moment it appears that Voyager, the lead company in this station, is attempting to capture the international market that up to now has been part of ISS. Airbus gets it direct access to European companies and the Europeans Space Agency (ESA). Mitsubishi now gets it direct access to Japanese government financing.

The other stations being built with NASA financing, Axiom and Orbital Reef, so far seem more focused on getting American business, as is Vast’s Haven-1 station, being built entirely from private funds.

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Pushback: The legislative effort in Texas to end DEI in state colleges is beginning to work

1:19 pm

Bring a gun to a knife fight: When the Texas state legislature passed a law last May (subsequently signed by Governor Greg Abbott) to ban all Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs in state colleges, I expressed some doubts about whether this legislature would work.

The universities have simply been told the money they formally spent on DEI can no longer be spent on such racist operations. Since they have the cash anyway, what will prevent college administrators to create a new office with a new name, let’s call it the “Openness and Support Office”, and hire the fired DEI staffers that have been terminated from a different college. By simply rearranging the chairs, these administrators — who apparently all enthusiastically support DEI’s Marxist and racist program — can recreate it without making it obvious. And the legislature has agreed to give them the funds for doing so.

It appears the house-cleaning is beginning in Texas universities
It appears the DEI house-cleaning is beginning
in Texas’ universities.

Since then, Texas university administrations have been responding to the legislation in a variety of ways, all of which suggest that, though my doubts continue to have merit, the bill is having a laudatory effect. This week the University of Texas at Austin announced that it is shuttering its DEI offices and terminating around sixty people associated with these bigoted programs. From the email announcement by the university president, Jay Hartzell:

[F]unding used to support DEI across campus prior to SB 17’s effective date will be redeployed to support teaching and research. As part of this reallocation, associate or assistant deans who were formerly focused on DEI will return to their full-time faculty positions. The positions that provided support for those associate and assistant deans and a small number of staff roles across campus that were formerly focused on DEI will no longer be funded.

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Gilmour’s Eris rocket now assembled and ready for launch from Bowen spaceport in Australia

10:43 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Click for original map.

The Austrialia rocket starup Gilmour has now assembled its first Eris rocket in anticipation of its first orbital test launch from that company’s Bowen spaceport on the east coast of Australia.

According to the report at the link, the launch could happen “in the coming weeks,” though no date has been set. Gilmour has already received its spaceport license from the Australian government, but has not yet gotten its launch license from the Australian Space Agency, despite putting in its application two years ago.

It appears there is now a race between this spaceport and the one on the south coast run by Southern Launch to launch first. Both are saying they will launch in mere weeks, but both are also awaiting launch approvals from the Australian Space Agency, which appears to be having difficulties making these first approvals. Either it is dragging its feet, or doesn’t know how to do this yet. Hopefully the bureaucrats will figure out how to say yes to freedom and let these spaceports and companies finally launch, before they run out of cash.

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NASA picks three commercial companies to build manned lunar rovers

10:29 am

Capitalism in space: NASA yesterday announced that it has picked three commercial companies, Astrolab, Intuitive Machines, and Lunar Outpost, to begin feasibility design work on its new manned lunar rovers, dubbed a Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV), for its planned Artemis missions to the Moon.

NASA will acquire the LTV as a service from industry. The indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity, milestone-based Lunar Terrain Vehicle Services contract with firm-fixed-price task orders has a combined maximum potential value of $4.6 billion for all awards.

The three companies are actually each a partnership of several American companies, as follows:

  • Astrolab is building its FLEX rover in partnership with Axiom Space, Inc., and Odyssey Space. Its contract is worth up to $1.9 billion.
  • Intuitive Machines is building its RACER rover in partership with AVL, Boeing, Michelin, and Northrop Grumman. This initial award is worth $30 million, but future buys from NASA could exceed $1 billion.
  • Lunar Outpost is building its Lunar Dawn rover in partnership with Lockheed Martin, General Motors, Goodyear, and MDA Space.

All three lead companies are essentially startups that have partnered with older established players, a likely requirement imposed by NASA to give their effort some experienced help. Though this system of dividing up the work between all the players follows the old scheme used by NASA and the established big space companies for decades in order to guarantee every company gets steady work and a continuing cash flow from the government, the difference is that the product will be designed, built, and owned by each partnership, not NASA, allowing each to sell that product to others outside the agency.

If this goes as planned, eventually the government money will become somewhat irrelevant, once a real commercial industry starts functioning in space and on the Moon. That’s what happened in the airplane industry in the 1920s to the 1950s.

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Biden’s anti-Christian Easter proclamation means the Democrats believe their November victory is certain

11:48 am

Biden's proclamation declaring Easter a day to honor the queer agenda
Biden’s proclamation declaring Easter a day
honoring the queer agenda. Click for full proclamation.

The decision by the White House to declare Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian religion, to instead be this year’s “Transgender Day of Visibility”, as shown by the screen capture of his declaration to the right, outraged and insulted millions of religious people throughout the country.

That outrage was further inflamed when the very next day Joe Biden boldly denied he had done any such thing, even though he had done it only one day previously.

“I didn’t do that,” Biden said when asked about proclaiming Easter Sunday ‘trans day of visibility.” Asked about Speaker Johnson’s claim otherwise, the president replied, “he’s thoroughly uninformed.”

Most political analysis of these events has focused on whether these actions suggest Biden is entirely incompetent, or whether it proves that others run things in the White House and that Biden is merely a puppet on a string. In either case, those analyses noted that these actions showed an amazing contempt for the religious community that could only hurt Biden in November.

I see this in an entirely different way. While the decision showed utter contempt of Christians, who consider the queer agenda to be deviant and sinful, it also showed us two things about the Democratic Party leadership, whether Biden or the puppet masters pulling his strings, that should truly terrify every single American who values our democratic republic, its Constitution, and its Bill of Rights.
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