Tag: policy

Students win settlement against college for censoring their speech illegally

2:04 pm

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

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

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

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

The students have now won a settlement in court.
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NASA has decided to consider bringing Starliner down unmanned

10:32 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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European aerospace company Safran to open production facility in U.S.

9:06 am

The European aerospace company Safran, which presently partners with Airbus to build the Ariane-6 rocket, has announced that it will open a production facility in Colorado for manufacturing its electrical propulsion thrusters used by satellites.

The American facility will focus on U.S. government and commercial customers, with the French line focusing on customers in the rest of the world. “With this double manufacturing line, we are able to provide trust and confidence to both U.S. domestic, national programs as well as commercial programs,” he said.

The thrusters produced by the two lines will be identical other than the sourcing of components for its power processing unit. The units produced in the United States will use U.S. components while those made in France will use foreign components.

The thruster, called the EPS X00, or “X-hundred”, is a new design and is expected to launch on satellites beginning in 2026. This announcement lets American companies know it is available to them as well. Being built in the U.S. it avoids the strict State Department ITAR regulations that would make it difficult for Safran to sell its European-built thrusters to American satellite companies.

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Axiom changes its CEO

8:59 am

Axiom's space station assembly sequence
The assembly sequence for Axiom’s space station while attached to ISS.
Click for original image.

After founding and leading Axiom for the past eight years, CEO Mike Suffredini, has decided to transfer to the company’s board of directors and pass the company’s leadership to someone else.

“I have dedicated over 40 years to advancing humanity through human spaceflight, including the past eight-plus years alongside Dr. Kam Ghaffarian at Axiom Space,” said Suffredini. “For personal reasons, I have decided to step down as CEO, effective August 9th. I will remain as an advisor to ensure a smooth transition and continue my role as a board member.”

Dr. Ghaffarian, Axiom Space’s Executive Chairman and co-founder, will assume the role of interim CEO until a permanent successor is appointed. His extensive experience and deep industry knowledge make him well-suited to lead the company during this period.

Suffredini’s a long career at NASA before founding Axiom was crucial in establishing the company’s success. He knew how to avoid all the pitfalls of working with the government agency, and was able to negotiate the right deals to make the partnership with NASA proceed smoothly. That inside knowledge probably allowed his company to beat out Bigelow Aerospace, which had been the first to build commercial space station modules but has now faded from sight.

The result is that Axiom was to fly commercial passenger flights to ISS using Dragon capsules, and is going to likely be one of the first commercial stations to begin operations. (The race to be first is presently being led by Axiom and Vast, with Vast looking to be slightly ahead.)

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Lufthansa signs deal with Airbus to train its astronauts for the Starlab space station

8:46 am

the proposed Starlab space station
the proposed Starlab space station

Airbus has now signed an agreement with Lufthansa for it to train the astronauts Europe will fly to the Starlab space station, being built by a consortium of American, European, and Japanese companies.

US-based Voyager Space and Airbus signed an agreement in August 2023 to jointly pursue the development of the Starlab space station. The pair is currently targeting 2028 for the launch of the low Earth orbit destination, with commercial activities commencing in 2029. This timeline will allow for a small window of overlap with International Space Station operations before the orbiting laboratory is decommissioned in 2030.

In a 6 August announcement on Twitter, Airbus Defence and Space revealed the expanding team behind the development of Starlab. The list included Hilton Hotels for crew lodging design, Northrop Grumman for the development of an autonomous docking system for resupply spacecraft, and Lufthansa Aviation Training (LAT) for the training of future Starlab astronauts. Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, MDA Space, Palantir, and Ohio State University round out the partnership.

Though Voyager Space is supposed to be leading the project and obtained the seed money from NASA to get it started, the nature of this announcement suggests that it is Airbus who is really in charge at this time. At a minimum, the partnership has definitely transferred much control from the U.S. to Europe.

This shift should not be a surprise, since it became clear shortly after the August 2023 deal was signed that Europe had decided to focus its investment energies on Starlab and make it the European space station for the future.

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China launches first 18 satellites in a new Starlink-type internet constellation

11:52 pm

China today launched the first 18 satellites in a new Starlink-type internet constellation dubbed Spacesail, its Long March 6A rocket lifting off from the Taiyuan spaceport in north China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stage and four strap-on boosters landed within China. Jay notes that this Chinese constellation is now ahead of Blue Origin’s Kuiper constellation, a pattern that sadly has been repeated over and over again.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

77 SpaceX
33 China
9 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 91 to 49, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 77 to 63.

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Sunspot update: In July the Sun produced the most sunspots in almost a quarter century

9:13 am

Every month since this website began fourteen years ago, when NOAA posts its update of its monthly graph tracking the number of sunspots on the Sun’s Earth-facing hemisphere, I post my own analysis, adding some details to provide the larger context.

Of all those updates — numbering about 168 — this month’s is possibly the most significant. Since around 2008, the Sun began a long period where it was unusually quiet, with the solar maximum that occurred in 2014 possibly the weakest in two hundred years. Before that weak maximum begun, half the solar science community predicted it would be a very powerful maximum, while half predicted a weak maximum. Both got it wrong, though the weak prediction was closer though still too high.

When it came time to predict the next solar maximum, expected around 2025, that same solar science community was once again in disagreement. Most approved a NOAA science panel prediction in April 2020 calling for another weak minimum, similar to the one in 2014. A few dissented, however, and instead predicted in June 2020 that the maximum would be one of the strongest ever. In April 2023 however those dissenters chickened out, and revised their prediction downward, still forecasting a peak higher than the NOAA prediction but no longer anywhere as intense.

Based on what happened on the Sun in July, they should have had more faith in their earlier prediction.
» Read more

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Charges against pro-Hamas rioters have routinely been dropped nationwide

1:23 pm

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

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

The list is discouraging, to put it mildly:

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

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

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Chinese scientists discover thin-layered graphene in Chang’e-5 lunar samples

9:47 am

Chinese scientists analyzing one of the lunar samples brought back in 2021 by Chang’e-5 from the Moon’s near side have detected for the first time what they call “natural few-layered graphene.”

You can read the paper here. The samples from Chang’e-5 came from some of what are believed are some of the youngest lava on the Moon. This discovery confirms that conclusion. From the paper:

The identification of graphene in the core–shell structure suggests a bottom-up synthesis process rather than exfoliation, which generally involves a high-temperature catalytic reaction. Therefore, a formation mechanism of few-layer graphene and graphitic carbon is proposed here.

Volcanic eruption, a typical high-temperature process, occurred on the Moon. Lunar soil can be stirred up by solar wind and high-temperature plasma discharge can be generated on the Moon’s surface. … [T]he Fe-bearing mineral particles, such as olivine and pyroxene, in lunar soil might catalyse the conversion of carbon-containing gas molecules in the solar wind or polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into graphitic carbon of different thicknesses and morphologies on their surfaces, including few-layer graphene flakes and carbon shells.

These graphene flakes are likely to disappear over time, so its existence reinforces the belief that this lava is young.

Unlike too many American planetary scientists recently — who have repeatedly implied that finding anything even remotely related to life processes suggests the possibility of life on Venus and Mars — the Chinese scientists don’t make the additional absurd claim that finding carbon on the Moon suggests the existence of life. It doesn’t. Kudos to them for being good scientists.

As a result, expect American mainstream media to pay no attention to this result, despite its intriguing and unprecedented nature.

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Treaty allowing U.S. rockets to launch from Australia goes into effect

9:30 am

Australian commercial spaceports
Australia’s commercial spaceports. Click for original map.

On July 23, 2024 the Australian government finalized its October 2023 agreement with the United States to allow U.S. rockets to launch from Australia soil, as well as allow Australian rocket startups to launch American satellites.

The agreement is mostly a boost for the three spaceports presently vying for business in Australia. Not only will this widen their customer base — with many international rocket startups looking for alternatives because of regulatory burdens elsewhere — it will allow any Australian rocket startups to sell their rockets to American satellite companies. At the moment there is only one such company, Gilmour, but this treaty will encourage investment in others.

This deal will also add impetus to the negotiations presently going on between SpaceX and Australia.

The company is reportedly in discussions with US and Australian authorities to bring down one of its rockets off Australia’s northwest coast and tow it into a yet-to-be-determined port for repatriation to the US. The talks follow a SpaceX Starship rocket making a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean in June. There are also reportedly tentative discussions about launching rockets from Australia or bringing them back directly onto Australian soil.

Using Australia as a launch site will not do much to relieve SpaceX of the red tape it has been struggling with from the federal bureaucracy, but it will provide it additional options for increasing its launch rate as well as the testing of Starship. It clearly wants to recover Starships as soon as possible for study, and having them brought to Australia quickly after splashdown would facilitate that effort.

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Arianespace finally schedules last Vega launch

9:04 am

After improvising an upper stage fix because the rocket’s Italian manufacturer, Avio, literally lost the stage’s tanks, Arianespace on July 31, 2024 finally scheduled the last Vega rocket launch, targeting a September 3, 2024 lift off from French Guiana.

The change to the upper stage was required after the company managed to lose two of its four propellant tanks. As the production line for the AVUM upper stage tanks had been shut down in anticipation of the rocket’s retirement, Avio was forced to find a way to instead utilize the larger propellant tanks from the Vega C AVUM+ upper stage. With this process now complete, the company has a clear path toward the rocket’s swan song.

This rocket has been replaced by the more powerful Vega-C. Control and ownership on future launches has also been shifted from Arianespace back to Avio as part of Europe’s transition from using a government-run launch monopoly (Ariancespace) to relying on multiple competitive and independent private companies.

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NASA/Boeing push back final decision of Starliner return

8:58 am

Starliner docked to ISS
Starliner docked to ISS.

Someone at NASA getting cold feet? According to a NASA posting today, the review that was supposed to happen this week to determine a return date for Starliner and its two-astronaut crew has been postponed until next week as engineers continue analzying the results of the recent thruster hot fire tests, both on the ground and on ISS.

The wording of this posting is intriguing, to say the least:

Teams are taking their time to analyze the results of recent docked hot-fire testing, finalize flight rationale for the spacecraft’s integrated propulsion system, and confirm system reliability ahead of Starliner’s return to Earth from the International Space Station.

Forward work for the team also includes finalizing the spacecraft’s undocking procedures and operational mitigations that could be used in flight, if needed, to build further confidence in the system. Meanwhile, Starliner ground and mission support teams are continuing to prepare for undocking by participating in integrated simulations with space station operations teams.

Following the completion of Starliner’s return planning, which is expected to continue into next week, more information will be shared about the agency’s return readiness review preparations and subsequent media briefing. As always, astronaut safety remains the top priority for both NASA and Boeing. [emphasis mine]

Up until this posting, I have been confidently predicting the two astronauts would return on Starliner. Now I am not so sure. It seems the data from the hot fire tests, especially the most recent tests on the Starliner capsule docked to ISS, was not as encouraging or did not confirm the conclusions drawn from the previous ground-based tests, and have required further analysis. This might not in the end make a difference, but the wording of this NASA’s press release, including the highlighted emphasis on astronaut safety, suggests NASA is at least considering the idea of bringing the astronauts home on a Dragon capsule.

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China launches “high-orbit internet satellite”

8:45 am

China last night successfully launched what its state-run press merely labels as a “high-orbit internet satellite”, its Long March 3B rocket lifting off from its Xichange spaceport in southwest China.

No word on where the rocket’s lower stage and strap-on boosters, using very toxic hypergolic fuels, crashed inside China. Previous launches have had those booster crash near habitable area.

The leaders in the 2024 launch race:

75 SpaceX
32 China
8 Rocket Lab
8 Russia

American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 88 to 48, while SpaceX by itself still leads the entire world combined, including American companies, 75 to 61.

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

4:57 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hat tip stringer Jay.

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

1:39 pm

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

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

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

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

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

How horrible. People at the Secret Service are “hurting!”
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Update on Starship/Superheavy at Boca Chica

10:48 am

Link here. Progress is being made, but it remains unclear when the next orbital test flight of Superheavy/Starship will take place. Musk had predicted early August, and though the company appears getting close, there remains no word yet on from the FAA about issuing a launch license.

The article at the link however provides a lot of information about the construction of the second launch site at Boca Chica, as well as the future Starship prototypes to be launched. The next flight, the fifth, will use what SpaceX is calling its Block 1 version of the spaceship. The sixth flight will also fly this version. The seventh flight however will fly what SpaceX dubs its Block 2 verison, incorporating many upgrades and changes based on the previous test flights.

This information suggests several things. First, SpaceX wants to do three more orbital test launches in the near future, likely before the end of this year. Whether the FAA will allow such a thing remains unknown. The environmental reassessment that it issued in 2022 allows SpaceX to do five launches per year at Boca Chica, but requires the company to get FAA approval for each one, and also requires SpaceX to submit extensive paperwork before that approval will even be considered. Whether the FAA can move quickly enough between test flights to get this three more launches completed before December seems very doubtful, based on its past track record.

Second, it gives us a sense of the overall development. In developing Falcon 9, SpaceX went through five Block designs before the operational Block 5 that now flies so routinely. The company however was flying operationally and profitably by Block 2. If SpaceX is now moving to Block 2 for Starship, it means it is likely confident that this version will be capable of returning Starship to the ground undamaged and up to additional flights.

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ULA squelches independent photography of its launches

10:27 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10:12 am

Callisto's basic design
Callisto’s basic design

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

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

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

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

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

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

1:27 pm

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

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

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

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

10:32 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9:54 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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China scientists propose both a communications and GPS-type infrastructure on the Moon

9:34 am

In line with the remarkably rational and long term plans China has developed for exploring the solar system, Chinese scientists have proposed the country develop both a communications and GPS-type infrastructure on the Moon, with both including constellations of satellites in orbit as well as facilities on the ground.

A first phase would establish satellites in elliptical frozen orbits around the moon. A second phase would see further … satellites and spacecraft at Earth-moon Lagrange points 1, 2, 4 and 5, a near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO), and a spacecraft in geostationary orbit, termed a cislunar space station.

A third and final phase would add satellites in existing and new distant retrograde orbits (DRO), forming a near-moon space and extended space constellations. The system also includes comprehensive ground-based facilities.

While this plan is simply a proposal, it fits with China’s overall strategies for lunar exploration, all of which are designed carefully so that they can be scaled up for more complex operations there as well as elsewhere in the solar system. And based on China’s track record in space in the past decade, we should be entirely confident this program or some variation will be built.

That is, unless China undergoes a major economic collapse and a change in leadership that has different priorities.

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

2:27 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

1:07 pm

Google, hostile to free speech

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

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

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

Wentz had no way of finding out what that “unwanted content” was, as Googlegroups did not provide this essential information, instead informing her that she would simply have “to pursue your claims in court.”
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FAA releases proposed environmental assessment of Boca Chica permitting more Starship/Superheavy launches

10:19 am

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

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

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

9:35 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Local billionaire landowner renews his oppposition to the Sutherland spaceport

10:58 am

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

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

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

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

12:51 pm

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

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

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

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

For conservatives who have been paying attention for the past decade, none of these conclusions are a surprise. The FBI, as well as the CIA, ATF, the Secret Service as well as the entire intelligence and security community in the federal government have not only demonstrated obvious incompetence in their basic jobs since Obama was president, these agencies have clearly become partisan weaponized tools for the Democratic Party.
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NASA/Boeing: Cause of Starliner thruster failure identified

10:21 am

According to NASA and Boeing officials, ground static fire engine tests have now identified the likely cause of the thruster failures on the Starliner capsule during its docking to ISS in early June, and puts them in a position next week to determine a return date for the capsule and its two astronauts.

It appears the problem is related to teflon seals in the thrusters, detected while engineers did a series of tests on the ground with another Starliner capsule. Based on this information, Boeing thinks it can fix the problem on future capsules, while also insuring there will be no problems returning the astronauts from ISS.

The thrusters in question are all attitude thrusters, where there is a lot of redundancy and the issue has been seen to be well controlled from the start. The larger thrusters used for the undocking and de-orbit burn have been tested as well, and have not shown any similar issues at all.

The ground tests have also identified the cause of the helium leaks within the capsule engine system. Boeing will use this data to fix later capsules as well. These leaks are not a concern for the return to Earth.

The plan now is to do in the next few days one more set of static fire tests with the capsule docked on ISS, doing short bursts with all the attitude thrusters to further confirm what has been learned on the ground. If that goes as expected, a final meeting next week will determine the return date for the capsule and crew.

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Saxavord: We will get our last required spaceport license by September

11:45 pm

Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea
Proposed spaceports surrounding Norwegian Sea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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